Category Archives: Astronomy and space
Diamonds and other treasures found in Sutter’s Mill meteorite
By Kat Kerlin Researchers digging deeper into the origins of the Sutter’s Mill meteorite, which exploded over California’s Gold Country in 2012, have found diamonds and other “treasures” that provide important new insight into the early days of our solar …
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Making oxygen before life
About one-fifth of the Earth’s atmosphere is oxygen, pumped out by green plants as a result of photosynthesis and used by most living things on the planet to keep our metabolisms running. But before the first photosynthesizing organisms appeared about …
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Dust to dust: BICEP2 result on gravitational waves may not be so strong
Earlier this year, physicists celebrated results from the BICEP2 experiment which reported evidence of gravitational waves, a signature of cosmic inflation immediately after the Big Bang. But earlier this week, results from the Planck space telescope cast doubt on the …
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UC Davis-led team achieves first light for flying infrared instrument
As we blogged last week, the EXES (Echelon-Cross-Echelle Spectrograph) instrument, a collaboration involving UC Davis and NASA Ames scientists and engineers and led by research scientist Matthew J. Richter of the UC Davis Physics Department, successfully carried out its first …
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SOFIA flying observatory passing over tonight
The SOFIA flying lab will make its second flight with the EXES experiment on board tonight. The EXES (Echelon-Cross-Echelle-Spectrograph) project is lead by UC Davis phyicist Matt Richter. The flight plan should have SOFIA, which operates out of Palmdale, Calif., …
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Hubble weighs the “El Gordo” colliding galaxy cluster
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has weighed the largest known galaxy cluster in the distant universe and found that it definitely lives up to its nickname: El Gordo, Spanish for “the fat one.” By precisely measuring how much the gravity from …
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Infrared observatory to take flight
On March 31, a team from UC Davis and NASA Ames installed the EXES Science Instrument aboard SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. EXES (Echelon-Cross-Echelle Spectrograph) is designed to observe light in the mid-infrared at high resolution. It operates …
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Physicists reflect on gravity wave discovery
Contributed by Lloyd Knox, Department of Physics On March 17, the scientific world was shaken by a dramatic announcement: Astronomers reported what many consider to be the “smoking gun” of a theorized stage in the very early evolution of the …
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Rover’s first sample of Martian soil comes up wet
Contributed by Kat Kerlin The Mars Rover Curiosity is all grown up and eating solids. The first solid sample ingested and analyzed by the rover revealed a high percentage of water in the soil. Water molecules bound to fine-grained soil …
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Engineering professor’s ‘messaging code’ helps NASA communicate with IRIS spacecraft
One of NASA’s recent missions, the IRIS Solar Observatory, has been communicating its results via a 7/8 Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) code developed by Shu Lin, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The Interface Region …
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