News: 2019

December

Congratulations to Phil Mansfield

December 4, 2019

Phil Mansfield has been appoined as  the James Cronin Graduate Student Fellow.


November

Bjorn Scholz has received the APS’s 2020 Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation Award

November 19, 2019

Citation: "For central contribution to the first measurement of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering."


October

Prof. Joshua Frieman awarded $1 million by DOE Office of Science

October 18, 2019

The Department of Energy has awarded Fermilab and University of Chicago scientist Josh Frieman $1 million over three years as part of the inaugural Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellowship program.


September

Ambitious project to map the Big Bang’s afterglow earns NSF funding

September 30, 2019

UChicago-led proposal receives NSF funding for pioneering sky measurements

The National Science Foundation has awarded $4 million to the University of Chicago to host the development of an ambitious multi-institutional program to map the leftover light from the Big Bang in greater detail than ever before.

Called CMB-S4, the groundbreaking project will allow us to see back in time to the earliest epoch of the universe. Remnant light from this period, called the cosmic microwave background, is still visible in the skies and holds clues to many of the most pressing mysteries about the universe - from its earliest moments to how it evolved to produce the wondrous structure of galaxies, stars and planets that we see today.

"The history of the universe-and the physics that govern its evolution - are encoded in the cosmic microwave background, and rigorous, precise measurements will allows us to unlock this information and will likely lead to new discoveries," said renowned UChicago cosmologist John Carlstrom, principal investigator for this initial phase of the project and co-spokesperson of the CMB-S4 collaboration, who also holds a joint appointment at Argonne National Laboratory. "These are big, big topics in physics, many of which we don't know how to get at any other way."


Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration awarded a 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

September 16, 2019

Congratulations to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration for being awarded the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The citation reads: "For the first image of a supermassive black hole, taken by means of an Earth-sized alliance of telescopes.”  The $3 million prize will be shared equally among the 347 co-authors.

Several UChicago researchers are involved in the EHT collaboration, and the 10 meter South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a critical component of the network of telescopes that make up the EHT.   Chicagoland EHT collaboration members include Brad Benson, John Carlstrom, Tom Crawford, Jason Henning, Ryan Keisler, Erik Leitch, Daniel Michalik, Andrew Nadolski, Steve Padin, and Sasha Rahlin.
 


July

New measure of Hubble constant adds to mystery about universe’s expansion rate

July 16, 2019


May

Scientists measure half-life of element that’s longer than the age of the universe

May 1, 2019


April

Astronomers Take First-Ever Picture of a Black Hole

April 11, 2019


January

After mapping millions of galaxies, Dark Energy Survey finishes data collection

January 9, 2019