astrophysics

Particle detectors recorded neutrinos from supernova SN1987A hours before telescopes saw the first light. Thirty years later, scientists around the world are eager to detect neutrinos from another one. The international Fermilab-hosted Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment will be looking for them. These neutrinos can tell us more about supernovae themselves and may hint at new physics that could upend the Standard Model of particle physics.

For The New York Times, Feb. 25, 2019: Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. Fermilab scientist Josh Frieman is quoted in this article.

From This Week in Science, Feb. 20, 2019:
This podcast features Antonella Palmese, a postdoctoral research associate at Fermilab and a member of the Dark Energy Survey, which recently completed its six-year observation of a section of the southern sky.

From CNN, Feb. 16, 2019: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln discusses the Zwicky Transient Facility, a massive sky-survey instrument designed to scan the heavens and look for “transients” or things that brighten unexpectedly. When the instrument sees a change, alerts go out to other astronomers subscribed to the service, who can then use even more powerful telescopes to study the transient event in detail. Even the public can get a daily summary of the previous night’s happenings.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will manage unprecedented volumes of data produced each night. Scheduled to come online in the early 2020s, the LSST will use a 3.2-gigapixel camera to photograph a giant swath of the heavens. It’ll keep it up for 10 years, every night with a clear sky, creating the world’s largest astronomical stop-motion movie.

From 365 Days of Astronomy, Feb. 9, 2019: In this podcast, The Dark Energy Survey started in 2013 to map dark energy over 5000 square degrees of sky. Writer and poet Amy Catanzano visited Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory during the Dark Energy Survey. In this podcast, Amy discusses her work in quantum poetics, her experience with the Dark Energy Survey and shares some of her poetry.

From Scientific American, Jan. 30, 2019: Fermilab scientist Antonella Palmonese weighs in on a new method of determining the Hubble constant. The method uses data taken from the Fermilab-hosted Dark Energy Survey.

From Nature Reviews Physics, Jan. 28, 2019: The Dark Energy Survey completed its six-year-mission to map more than 300 million distant galaxies; however, an equally arduous task — analyzing the acquired 50 terabytes of data with a view to understanding the expansion of the universe — is just beginning.

From APS’s Physics, Jan. 29, 2019: On Jan. 9, a handful of researchers with the Dark Energy Survey — one of the most ambitious attempts to probe the dynamics of the universe’s expansion — headed to the control room of Chile’s Blanco Telescope. For one last time, they opened the white telescope’s dome. From their perch overlooking the red Andean Mountains, they set up for a night of observing the southern sky.

From WDCB’s First Light, Jan. 20, 2019: This WDCB interview features Fermilab scientists Brenna Flaugher and Tom Diehl talking about the final nights of the Dark Energy Survey.