Thursday, October 27, 2011
Three planets -- each orbiting its own giant, dying star -- have been discovered by an international research team led by Alexander Wolszczan, Evan Pugh Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State and the discoverer of the first planets ever found outside our solar system. Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, astronomers observed the planets' parent stars, which are tens of light years away from our solar system. One of the massive, dying stars has an additional mystery object orbiting it. The new research is expected to shed light on the evolution of planetary systems around dying stars. It also will help astronomers to understand how metal content influences the behavior of dying stars.
The research will be published in December in the Astrophysical Journal. The first author of the paper is Sara Gettel, a graduate student from Penn State's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the paper is co-authored by three graduate students from Poland. (more)
Monday, October 25, 2010
An international program to unveil the nature of Dark Energy, the mysterious force that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, has been awarded a grant of $8 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The survey, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Project (HETDEX), is led by the University of Texas at Austin and includes Penn State, Texas A&M University, and three institutions in Germany. (more)
Thursday, October 21, 2010
An international program to unveil the nature of Dark Energy, the mysterious force that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, has been awarded a grant of $8 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Project (HETDEX), is led by the University of Texas at Austin and includes Penn State University, Texas A&M University, and three institutions in Germany. Penn State is one of the major institutional partners of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, one of the largest optical telescopes in the world. (more)
Monday, February 09, 2009
"Galaxies and Their Supermassive Black Holes" is a free public lecture that will be given on Feb. 14, 2009, by Michael Eracleous, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State. The event is a Penn State component of the International Year of Astronomy and is the fourth of six lectures in the 2009 Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science, a free minicourse for the general public with the theme "Our Universe: From the Big Bang to Life." (more)
