In this month’s Three-Minute Egghead, Sarah Stewart and Simon Lock talk about synestias. A synestia is a new type of planetary object, they proposed, formed when a giant collision between planet-size objects creates a mass of hot, vaporized rock spinning with high angular momentum. Synestias could be an important stage in planet formation, and we might be able to find them in other solar systems.

https://soundcloud.com/user-570302262/three-minute-egghead-synestia-a-new-planetary-object?in=user-570302262/sets/three-minute-egghead-a-podcast

More information

News release: Synestia, A New Type of Planetary Object

New Theory Explains How the Moon Got There

Simon Lock’s Synestia Page

SNO+ neutrino detector being filled with ultrapure water. The detector will search for neutrinos from distant supernovae and nuclear reactors. Credit: SNO+ Collaboration

Not a still from a science fiction movie, but the SNO+ neutrino detector being filled with very pure water prior to starting operations. Located over a mile underground in a mine in Ontario, Canada, the SNO+ detector consists of an acrylic sphere 12 meters in diameter filled with 800 tonnes of scintillation fluid, floating in a bath of ultrapure water surrounded by 10,000 photomultiplier tubes that will detect flashes of light from passing neutrinos.

In the latest episode of the Three Minute Egghead podcast, UC Davis astronomer Marusa Bradac explains why she’s looking towards the beginning of time to find the furthest, faintest object in the universe, and how a gigantic lens in the sky can help.

Read the news release about this story here.

For more Three Minute Egghead podcasts, see our Soundcloud playlist here.

Update May 4: This event is now free of charge for all. RSVPs are requested.

By Becky Oskin

The first lecture in new Winston Ko Frontiers in Mathematical and Physical Sciences Public Lecture series will take place May 9. Veronika Hubeny will discuss modern understanding of black holes, and the remaining mysteries. Her talk, “Illuminating Black Holes,” begins at 5 p.m. on Monday, May 9, in the UC Davis Conference Center.

Contributed by the LUX Collaboration

The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment, which operates nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in the Black Hills of South Dakota, has already proven itself to be the most sensitive dark matter detector in the world. Now, a new set of calibration techniques employed by LUX scientists has again dramatically improved its sensitivity.

Researchers with LUX are looking for WIMPs, weakly interacting massive particles, which are among the leading candidates for dark matter.

The sun, as seen in neutrinos captured by the Super-K experiment in Japan (R. Svoboda and K. Gordan).

Robert Svoboda contributed to Nobel-winning neutrino experiments

By Becky Oskin

Billions of mysterious particles called neutrinos bombard your body every day. But catching even one neutrino is a huge effort. Nearly all neutrinos pass through people — and even our planet Earth — without a trace.

“There are 65 million neutrinos going through your thumbnail every second,” said Robert Svoboda, a UC Davis physics professor who has studied neutrinos for more than 25 years. “Only one will stop in your body during your lifetime.”

The collision of two massive galaxy clusters 1.6 billion light years from Earth revived a radio source in a fading cloud of electrons, creating a “radio phoenix.” The phenomenon was recorded by a team of astronomers including William Dawson of the UC Davis physics department and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Composite image of colliding galaxy cluster Abell 1033 combines X-ray data from Chandra (pink) along with radio data (green) and optical data that reveals the density of the galaxies (blue). (Chandra X-ray Observatory)

According to a news release from the Chandra X-ray observatory,

Much of the time, popular stories about science emphasize the broader impact, the implications for the field, what it might mean for our lives. But in reality, science is often about finding that some detail of the universe works the way we had already predicted, and for scientists that’s pretty cool too.

In one such discovery, UC Davis physicists have for the first time seen the signature of neutrinos spreading through the hot plasma of the early universe, at a time when light itself was still trapped in the plasma. The work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

By Kat Kerlin

Using more than a decade’s worth of daily satellite images, researchers have determined ecosystems of South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region bounce back from wildfires much more quickly in warmer winter weather.

However, there is an important caveat for other areas with Mediterranean climates at high risk of fires, such as drought-stricken California: The rate of recovery also depends on sufficient rainfall, especially in summer.

Data from South Africa shows how climate influences recovery from wildfire and could be generally applied to similar regions in California and Australia. (Andrew Latimer/UC Davis)

Every day, thousands of researchers rely on robust data networks to share petabytes of data with their colleagues around the world. A new $5 million, five-year National Science Foundation grant, awarded to Indiana University, the University of California, Davis and the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, seeks to bolster these networks by enabling unprecedented measurement and analysis.

The grant will fund NetSage, a network measurement, analysis and visualization service designed to address the needs of today’s international networks. The principal investigators are: Jennifer Schopf at Indiana University; Sean Peisert, assistant professor of computer science at UC Davis; and Jason Leigh at the University of Hawaii.