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Showing posts from February, 2016

Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley Scientists to Participate in New NASA Space Telescope Project.

Source:   By Glen Roberts Jr., Berkeley Lab News Center. Excerpt: WFIRST will explore mysteries of dark energy, hunt for distant planets, retrace universe's history during 6-year mission. ...The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will launch into its six-year mission from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in the mid-2020s. ...The telescope will be NASA’s next major astrophysics observatory following the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018. ...WFIRST is a 2.4-meter telescope with a primary mirror the same size as that of the Hubble Space Telescope. It has a field of view that is 100 times larger than Hubble’s infrared instrument and will measure light from an estimated billion galaxies. WFIRST is a 2.4-meter telescope with a primary mirror the same size as that of the Hubble Space Telescope. It has a field of view that is 100 times larger than Hubble’s infrared instrument and will measure light from an estimated billion galaxies.... http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2016/0

Gravitational waves, Einstein’s ripples in spacetime, spotted for first time

Source:   By Adrian Cho, Science Excerpt: ...two massive black holes—the ultrastrong gravitational fields left behind by gigantic stars that collapsed to infinitesimal points—slowly drew together... spiraled ever closer, until, about 1.3 billion years ago, they whirled about each other at half the speed of light and finally merged. The collision sent a shudder through the universe: ripples in the fabric of space and time called gravitational waves. Five months ago, they washed past Earth. And, for the first time, physicists detected the waves, fulfilling a 4-decade quest and opening new eyes on the heavens. The discovery marks a triumph for the 1000 physicists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of gigantic instruments in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. ...Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves 100 years ago, but directly detecting them required mind-boggling technological prowess ...[sensing] a wave th