UMass Amherst will host the January 18-20 American Physical Society Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP).
More info: https://blogs.umass.edu/cuwip/
The Astronomy Department will host the 5th New England Star Formation Meeting on January 18, 2019. The aim of this series of meetings is to bring together the students, postdocs, and faculty who are working on topics related to the Galactic star formation, in order to share recent research efforts. These topics include exoplanets and circumstellar disks, prestellar and poststellar cores, outflows, and molecular clouds. Participating institutions are: Amherst College, Boston University, Harvard-Smithsonain Center for Astrophysics, University of Connecticut, Wesleyan University, Yale University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Congratulations to graduate student Sarah Betti's first peer-reviewed publication, "Constraining the Magnetic Field of the Smith High Velocity Cloud using Faraday Rotation".
Abstract:
The Smith Cloud is a high velocity cloud (HVC) with an orbit suggesting it has made at least one passage through the Milky Way disk. A magnetic field found around this cloud has been thought to provide extra stability as it passes through the Galactic halo. We use Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array to measure Faraday rotation measures (RMs) toward 1105 extragalactic background point sources behind and next to the Smith Cloud to constrain the detailed geometry and strength of the magnetic field. The RM pattern across the cloud gives a detailed morphology of the magnetic field structure which indicates a field draped over the ionized gas and compressed at the head of the cloud. We constrain the peak line-of-site magnetic field strength to > +5 uG and create a model of the magnetic field to demonstrate that a draped configuration can qualitatively explain the morphology of the observed RMs.
Two undergraduate astronomy majors, Zoe Kearney and Kenneth Lin, were selected as UMass nominees for the national Goldwater Scholarship competition.
Professor Daniela Calzetti and Professor Mauro Giavalisco have been recently recognized by Web of Science Clarivate Analytics as High Cited Researchers for 2018. The full article from the UMass News and Media Relations can be found at: http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/twelve-umass-amherst-researchers
An international team of astrophysicists using the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) in central Mexico has detected an unexpected and powerful outflow of molecular gas in a distant active galaxy similar to the Milky Way.
Robert Williams, former director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, will speak on "Probing the Distant Universe with Hubble Space Telescope" on Monday, October 22 at 8:00 PM in the Student Union Ballroom at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Click on link below to see a poster for the event for more information.
On clear Saturdays, there will be a solar telescope at the site of the UMass SunWheel, from 1 to 2 pm, for observing the Sun. The event is free and open to the public.
The public is invited to witness sunrise and sunset associated with the autumnal equinox among the standing stones of the UMass Sunwheel on Saturday, September 22, 2018 at 6:30 am and 6 pm.
An international team of astronomers from Japan, Mexico and UMass Amherst studying a "monster galaxy" 12.4 billion light years away report that their instruments have achieved a 10-times-higher angular resolution than ever before, revealing galaxy structural details previously unknown. They also were able to analyze dynamic properties that could not be probed before.
UMass Amherst astronomer, Professor Daniel Wang, is heading to Chile, the world capital of astronomical observation, on a Fulbright Award.
UMass Amherst astronomer, Professor Daniel Wang, is heading to Chile, the world capital of astronomical observation, on a Fulbright Award.
What is the summer solstice? An astronomer explains
Sunwheel and sky-watching evens mark the Summer Solstice on June 20-21.
NASA's legacy extragalactic UV survey data released.
Last Thursday, May 17th, an international team of astronomers, led by Professor Daniela Calzetti, released the most comprehensive ultraviolet survey of nearby galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Professor Daniela Calzetti, PI for the Hubble Treasury project, and colleagues release stellar and star cluster catalogs for 50 LEGUS galaxies.
Graduate School honors distringuished mentor and staff award recipients, including Astronomy Department Associate Professor Alex Pope.
Astronomer Mark Heyer has created a new musical composition expressing the movement of gases through the galaxy as musical note, "Milky Way Blues".
Miranda Eiben, a double-major in astronomy and engineering, is one of the recipients of the Field Scholarship given by the UMass Alumni Association.