News at work

The first undergraduate on the Event Horizon Telescope to receive junior collaborator status thrives in the unknown. In his nearly two years with the team, he has developed computer libraries for data analysis and modeling, made movies of black holes and assisted with weather prediction.

This January marks the 10th anniversary of FRA Earned Value Management System certification. Obtaining EVMS certification a decade ago was a significant event because DOE had at that time established that projects that cost $50 million or more are required to use a certified system. The certification has enabled a broad suite of projects that have shaped the current landscape at Fermilab.

The Finance Section held an all-hands meeting on Monday, Jan.13. Here are the top five takeaways from the meeting.

Continuing the yearly induction of a new artist-in-residence each year, Fermilab is welcoming a pair of artists and the lab’s first guest composer to the lab in 2020.

To both understand the universe and improve equity, inclusion and diversity in physics, Brian Beckford looks to one word: respect.

In September, the Fermilab Users Executive Committee welcomed new members, who will serve in the 2019-21 term. All members of the Fermilab community are invited to meet with the brand new crew at a UEC meet-and-greet social event, co-hosted by the UEC and the Fermilab Student and Postdoc Association, on Friday, Jan. 17.

As phishing becomes more widespread and as attackers learn to make their phishing attempts more and more devious, exposure of usernames and passwords has become one of our primary cybersecurity risks. The best way to mitigate this risk is to use multifactor authentication. By doing so, a stolen credential alone will no longer provide access to Fermilab systems because one must also use a second factor to authenticate to these systems.

For the first time, a team of scientists has used the orientation of light left over from the early universe to detect gravitational lensing from galaxy clusters – the bending of light around these massive objects. Using gravitational lensing data taken by the South Pole Telescope and the Dark Energy Camera, Fermilab scientist Brad Benson and colleagues have demonstrated a new way to “weigh” galaxy clusters and ultimately shed light on dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the cosmos.

Underneath the vast, frozen landscape of the South Pole lies IceCube, a gigantic observatory dedicated to finding ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos stream through Earth from all directions, but they are lightweight, abundant and hardly interact with their surroundings. A forthcoming upgrade to the IceCube detector will provide deeper insights into the elusive particles.

The Big Bang is the term that scientists use to describe the beginning of the universe. In this 11-minute video, Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln clears up many common misconceptions about this fascinating topic.

Fermilab scientists have reached the lowest temperature ever achieved at Fermilab, testing a refrigerator for the SuperCDMS dark matter experiment. The fridge, which operates at close to absolute zero, is now one step closer toward installation at SNOLAB in Canada.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a flagship astronomy and astrophysics project currently under construction on a mountaintop in Chile, will be named for astronomer Vera Rubin, a key figure in the history of the search for dark matter.