When a solar flare filled with charged particles erupts from the sun, its magnetic fields sometime break a widely accepted rule of physics. The flux-freezing theorem dictates that the magnetic lines of force should flow away in lock-step with the particles, whole and unbroken. Instead, the lines sometimes break apart and quickly reconnect in a way that has mystified astrophysicists.

New research led by a Johns Hopkins mathematical physicist focuses on the “misbehavior” of magnetic fields in solar flares. In this image, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured an X1.2 class solar flare, peaking on May 15, 2013. Credit: NASA/SDO

But in a paper published in the May 23 issue of the journal Nature, an interdisciplinary research team led by a Johns Hopkins mathematical physicist says it has found a key to the mystery. The culprit, the group proposed, is turbulence—the same sort of violent disorder that can jostle a passenger jet when it occurs in the atmosphere. Using complex computer modeling to mimic what happens to magnetic fields when they encounter turbulence within a solar flare, the researchers built their case, explaining why the usual rule did not apply.

“The flux-freezing theorem often explains things beautifully,” said Gregory Eyink, a Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics professor who was lead author of the Nature study. “But in other instances, it fails miserably. We wanted to figure out why this failure occurs.”

Gregory Eyink, professor of applied mathematics and statistics at Johns Hopkins. Photo by Nat Creamer.

The flux-freezing theorem was developed 70 years ago by Hannes Alfvén, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics for closely related work. His principle states that magnetic lines of force are carried along in a moving fluid like strands of thread cast into a river, and thus they can never “break” and reconnect. But scientists have discovered that within violent solar flares, the principle does not always hold true. Studies of these flares have determined that their magnetic field lines sometimes do break like stretched rubber bands and reconnect in as little as 15 minutes, releasing vast amounts of energy that power the flare. “But the flux-freezing principle of modern plasma physics implies that this process in the solar corona should take a million years!” Eyink said. “A big problem in astrophysics is that no one could explain why flux-freezing works in some cases but not others.”

Some scientists suspected that turbulence was playing havoc with the behavior predicted by this principle. To find out, Eyink teamed up with other experts in astrophysics, mechanical engineering, data management and computer science, based at Johns Hopkins and other institutions. “By necessity, this was a highly collaborative effort,” Eyink said. “Everyone was contributing their expertise. No one person could have accomplished this.”

The team developed a computer simulation to replicate what happens under various conditions to the charged particles that exist in a plasma state of matter within solar flares. “Our answer was very surprising,” Eyink said. “Magnetic flux-freezing no longer holds true when the plasma becomes turbulent. Most physicists expected that flux-freezing would play an even larger role as the plasma became more highly conducting and more turbulent, but, as a matter of fact, it breaks down completely. In an even greater surprise, we found that the motion of the magnetic field lines becomes completely random. I do not mean ‘chaotic,’ but instead as unpredictable as quantum mechanics. Rather than flowing in an orderly, deterministic fashion, the magnetic field lines instead spread out like a roiling plume of smoke.”

Although some scholars may still believe there are other explanations for solar flares, Eyink said, “I think we made a pretty compelling case that turbulence alone can account for field-line breaking.”

The way the researchers from different disciplines teamed up with Eyink to solve the solar flare puzzle was particularly noteworthy. “We used ground-breaking new database methods, like those employed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, combined with high-performance computing techniques and original mathematical developments,” he said. “The work required a perfect marriage of physics, mathematics and computer science to develop a fundamentally new approach to performing research with very large datasets.”

Eyink added that the research could lead to a better understanding of solar flares and mass ejections of material from the sun’s corona. Such powerful “space weather” or geomagnetic storms can endanger astronauts, knock out communications satellites and even lead to massive blackouts of electrical power grids on Earth, he said.

Co-authors of the Nature study from Johns Hopkins’s Whiting School of Engineering and Krieger School of Arts and Sciences were Cristian Lalescu and Hussein Aluie, from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics; Kalin Kanov and Randal Burns, from the Department of Computer Science; Charles Meneveau, from the Department of Mechanical Engineering; and Alexander Szalay, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Aluie is also affiliated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The authors of this study are also affiliated with Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES), which has been facilitating groundbreaking research based on big data.

The co-authors from other institutions were Ethan Vishniac, from the Department of Physics and Engineering Physics, University of Saskatchewan, Canada; and Kai Bürger, from Fakultät für Informatik, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany.

Funding for the research came from National Science Foundation grant CDI-II: CMMI 0941530, and the database infrastructure was funded by NSF grant OCI-108849 and by Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science. Support also was provided by Microsoft Research. Vishniac’s work was supported by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

The turbulence data on which the analysis relies are publicly available at http://turbulence.pha.jhu.edu .

Related Johns Hopkins links:

Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics: http://www.ams.jhu.edu/

Department of Computer Science: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/

Department of Mechanical Engineering: http://www.me.jhu.edu/

Department of Physics and Astronomy: http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/

Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science: http://idies.jhu.edu/

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

April 4, 2013
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Amy Lunday
Office: 443-287-9960
Cell: 410-804-2551
acl@jhu.edu

A team of astronomers at The Johns Hopkins University has used data gathered by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to spot a supernova that exploded more than 10 billion years ago, breaking the previous record by roughly 350 million years.

Nicknamed in a nod to Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States and a Johns Hopkins alumnus, “SN Wilson” now stands as the farthest known supernova of the type used to measure cosmic distances. The team that identified SN Wilson is led by Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Adam Riess, who was one of three scientists awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for using Type Ia supernovae – the same type as SN Wilson – to deduce that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, not reversing or even slowing. That acceleration is now widely attributed to a mysterious, undescribed force called “dark energy.”

The team’s SN Wilson results will appear in the May 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

Finding remote supernovae opens new possibilities for measuring the universe’s expansion rate due to dark energy. So far, Riess’s team has uncovered more than 100 supernovae of all types and distances, ranging from 2.4 billion light years to more than 10 billion light years. Of those new discoveries, the team has identified eight Type Ia supernovae, including SN Wilson, that exploded more than 9 billion years ago.

Type Ia supernovae are bright beacons that are prized by astronomers because they provide a consistent level of brightness that can be used as a cosmic yardstick for measuring the expansion of space. They also yield clues to the nature of dark energy.

“The new distance record-holder provides a window into the very early universe,” said astronomer David O. Jones, a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins and lead author on the paper detailing the discovery. “We can test theories about how stars explode and how reliable these explosions are for understanding the evolution of the universe and its expansion.”

One of the debates surrounding Type Ia supernovae is the fuse that ignites them. This latest detection adds credence to one of two competing theories of how they explode. Although preliminary, the evidence favors the explosive merger of two burned out stars, called white dwarfs.

The discovery was part of a three-year Hubble program, begun in 2010, to survey faraway Type Ia supernovae to determine if they have changed over the 13.7 billion years since the big bang, the explosive birth of the universe. Called the CANDELS+CLASH Supernova Project, the census uses the sharp, and versatile Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to assist in the search for supernovae in near-infrared light and verify their distance with spectroscopy. The survey searches for supernovae in two large Hubble programs, the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey and the Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey with Hubble, which study thousands of galaxies.

The supernova team’s search technique involved taking multiple near-infrared images spaced roughly 50 days apart over the span of three years, looking for a supernova’s faint glow. The team spotted SN Wilson in December 2010 in the CANDELS survey. They then used WFC3′s spectrometer and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope to verify the supernova’s distance and to decode its light, finding the unique signature of a Type Ia supernova.

“These supernovae are important tools for studying the dark energy that is speeding up the expansion of space,” said Riess, the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins and a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “This study gives us a chance to ‘stress test’ the supernovae themselves to test how well we understand them.”

SN Wilson eclipses the previous distance record holder discovered by a separate team led by Riess’s fellow 2011 Nobel Prize-winner Saul Perlmutter of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University in Canberra won the 2011 Nobel  in physics along with Riess and Perlmutter.)

Astronomers still have much to learn about the nature of dark energy and how Type Ia supernovae explode.

“The Type Ia supernovae give us the most precise yardstick ever built, but we’re not quite sure if it always measures exactly a yard,” says Steve Rodney, a member of the Johns Hopkins team and a Hubble postdoctoral research fellow. “The more we understand these supernovae, the more precise our cosmic yardstick will become.”

Finding Type Ia supernovae so early in the universe suggests that the explosion mechanism is a merger between two white dwarfs. This model is favored over another supernova pathway in which a white dwarf gradually feeds off its partner, a normal star, and explodes when it accretes too much mass.

The team’s preliminary evidence shows a sharp decline in the rate of Type Ia supernova blasts between roughly 7.5 billion years ago and more than 10 billion years ago. The steep drop-off favors the merger of two white dwarfs because that model predicts that most stars in the early universe are too young to become Type Ia supernovae.

“If supernovae were popcorn, the question is how long before they start popping?” Riess says. “You may have different theories about what is going on in the kernel. If you see when the first kernels popped and how often they popped, it tells you something important about the process of popping corn.”

In the two white-dwarf scenario, the first supernovae pop off about 400 million years after they are born as stars, and then the rate gradually declines over time. “There is a cosmic ‘high noon’ for star formation at about 10 billion years ago,” Rodney explains. “If most of the supernovae were exploding very shortly after their birth then we would see a cosmic ‘high noon’ for supernova explosions at about the same time. We are actually finding relatively few supernovae like SN Wilson at the time of peak star formation, and this favors the double white dwarf model, with a modest time delay between formation and explosion.”

Knowing the type of trigger for Type Ia supernovae will also show how quickly the universe enriched itself with heavier elements, such as iron. These exploding stars produce about half of the iron in the universe, the raw material for building planets, and life.

For images and more information about SN Wilson, visit:
http://hubblesite.org/news/2013/11

For more information about NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://releases.jhu.edu/
Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

]]> http://releases.jhu.edu/2013/04/04/farthest-supernova/feed/ 0 http://releases.jhu.edu/2013/04/03/physics-fair-2013/ http://releases.jhu.edu/2013/04/03/physics-fair-2013/#comments Wed, 03 Apr 2013 16:34:37 +0000 Amy Lunday http://releases.jhu.edu/?p=8725 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS
901 S. Bond St., Suite 540
Baltimore, Maryland 21231

April 3, 2013
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Amy Lunday
Office: 443-287-9960
Cell: 410-804-2551
acl@jhu.edu

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University is hosting its 10th annual Physics Fair from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 13, coinciding with the annual Spring Fair celebration on the Homewood campus, 3400 N. Charles St. in Baltimore. Events will take place in the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy, located on the north end of the campus near Homewood Field.

Free and open to the public, the fair will feature individual and team competitions for local students, as well as a physics-themed scavenger hunt and demonstrations by Johns Hopkins physicists, graduate students and undergraduates. The idea is to bring physics to the community in a fun, accessible way. Highlights of the event include:

Professor Extraordinaire Shows, 12:15 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. Professor Peter Armitage and his assistants, using physics principles, will give a demonstration that will include fantastic displays, explosions, loud noises and bright lights.

Elementary, Middle and High School Science Bowl Competitions, 1:30 p.m., grades 1-4; 2:15 p.m., grades 5-8; 3 p.m., grades 9-12. Teams of up to four school-age students will compete to answer a variety of general science-related questions in a quiz show format. This activity will be held in the Bloomberg Center’s Schafler Auditorium. Winning teams receive trophies for their schools and individual prizes.

Elementary, Middle and High School Science Challenge Competitions, 11:30 a.m.
Individual competitions covering general science. Age groups same as bowl competitions. Winners receive gift cards and books.

Hopkins Construction Contest, 3:45 p.m.: Participants of all ages will have 30 minutes to construct a structure of some kind according to instructions to be given that day. All materials will be provided. Participants will sign up the day of the event. Prizes awarded to the winners.

Throughout the day, other activities – including a physics-themed scavenger hunt, the making of frozen ice cream using liquid nitrogen, a balloon rocket contest and more – will be held. The Morris Offit Telescope, located on the roof of the Bloomberg Center, also will be open, allowing visitors to observe sun spots and the activities of the sun’s corona using a special filter.

Several of the research laboratories in the Bloomberg Center will be open to the public. The Hubble Space Telescope program and the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science will also have displays.

For more information, visit http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~fair or contact Pam Carmen at 410-516-7346 or pam@pha.jhu.edu.

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://releases.jhu.edu/
Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

]]> http://releases.jhu.edu/2013/04/03/physics-fair-2013/feed/ 0 http://releases.jhu.edu/2013/03/15/higgs-boson-andrei-gritsan/ http://releases.jhu.edu/2013/03/15/higgs-boson-andrei-gritsan/#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:29:48 +0000 Amy Lunday http://releases.jhu.edu/?p=8677 Andrei Gritsan is a member of one of the two teams of scientists conducting experiments with the Large Hadron Collider to confirm that a particle discovered in July 2012 is a Higgs boson.

March 15, 2013
MEDIA CONTACT: Amy Lunday
Office: (443) 287-9960
Cell: (410) 804-2551
acl@jhu.edu

Andrei Gritsan

The announcement that researchers are closer than ever to confirming the existence of the Standard Model Higgs boson particle was made possible in part by contributions from physicists at The Johns Hopkins University who are members of one of two teams conducting experiments at the Large Hadron Collider.

One member of the Johns Hopkins team, experimental physicist Andrei Gritsan, an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is available to speak to reporters working on stories regarding today’s announcement from CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research. He belongs to the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment) collaboration and is co-leader of a team investigating one of the most promising channels revealing how Higgs could be found and studied.

CERN’s announcement coincides with the release of research results at the Moriond conference, a weeklong gathering of physicists taking place in Italy through March 16. Andrew James Whitbeck, a member of Gritsan’s research team and a graduate student in the Department of Physics at Johns Hopkins, was scheduled to make a presentation there titled “Measurements of Higgs Boson Properties in CMS” on March 14.

Gritsan says the Johns Hopkins team made a very significant contribution to the discovery of this boson last summer, and now to the measurement of its properties. Teams on both experiments studying the Higgs-like boson on LHC are using some of the techniques developed and suggested by the Johns Hopkins experts to identify the properties of the new boson, such as its spin, parity, and related properties.

“In just one channel with two Z-bosons alone, we prove that the chance of a mistake to see a new particle is less than one in a hundred billion,” Gritsan said. “With such an amazing precision, everything looks exceedingly consistent with this particle being the Higgs boson, such as 99.8 percent confidence in excluding opposite parity (property in the mirror reflection) or more than 99 percent exclusion of the suspect models with non-zero spin. It all points to the property of vacuum, which is filled with the all-penetrating Higgs field, where the boson is simply its excitation created in the laboratory. Our past, present, and future depend on the properties of this field, and we are still to understand all the implications of this grand discovery and to study in detail this new form of matter-energy never known before.”

To speak with Gritsan, contact Amy Lunday at 443-287-9960 (office) or 410-804-2551 (cell) or acl@jhu.edu.

Additional information:

The US LHC news release issued jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2013/Higgs-Boson-20130314.html

News release issued by CERN
http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2013/03/new-results-indicate-particle-discovered-cern-higgs-boson

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://releases.jhu.edu/
Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

February 14, 2013
MEDIA CONTACT: Amy Lunday
Office: (443) 287-9960
Cell: (410) 804-2551
acl@jhu.edu

A call to catalog asteroids
Richard Conn Henry, an astrophysicist in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, isn’t worried about the asteroid set to whiz by Earth on Friday. Instead, he’s grateful for the headline-generating near-miss. “It is helpful, a wake-up call that we should be cataloging all asteroids in case there is one out there with our name on it. If we caught it enough years in advance, we could do something about it.” Henry says that the U.S. Air Force monitors asteroids from an observatory in Hawaii to build a catalog of asteroid orbits, watching out for those that might threaten Earth. Henry is available to talk to reporters about how this ounce of prevention is, in the case of this particular asteroid, worth an estimated 130,000 metric tons of cure.

Altering the course of asteroids?
Andrew Cheng, Applied Physics Laboratory
As the number of known asteroids and other near-Earth objects increases, plans on how to deal with a potential threat have grown as well. One new concept is a joint NASA/ESA study called Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA), which includes a spacecraft that would impact – and perhaps alter the orbit of – an asteroid. Andrew Cheng of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is the U.S. lead for the AIDA study; Cheng also served as the lead scientist for NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), which in 2000-2001 became the first mission to orbit and land on an asteroid.

Rocks, Shocks and Asteroids
K.T. Ramesh, Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering
Our increasingly populated planet is vulnerable to unexpected, rare, but catastrophic “impact events” – including potential asteroid collisions – that could forever alter the Earth’s surface. A team at the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute has developed a computer model for the impact and disruption of asteroids to help protect against a planetary impact event. “Major impact events have the potential to create global catastrophes,” said K.T. Ramesh, the Alonzo G. Decker Jr. Professor of Science and Engineering in the university’s Whiting School of Engineering and founding director of HEMI. “It is highly likely that the next destructive impact event on Earth will be a low-altitude airburst from an asteroid similar to 2012 DA14.” Ramesh says that it is hard to predict exactly what would happen to life as we know it if an asteroid were to suddenly slam into the surface of the Earth; the destruction would depend on both the asteroid itself as well as where it hits – sea, land or urban environment. To account for all those variables, the HEMI approach uses what the team calls “impact science,” a multidisciplinary field which pulls together the various changes that occur when large amounts of energy suddenly interact with natural and human structures. While Ramesh cautions that our understanding of material behavior at such a large scale is limited and marked by uncertainty, HEMI’s computer model could quite literally help the world prepare for the next big thing. Ramesh will be presenting some of the team’s findings next month at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

To speak with Henry or Ramesh, contact Amy Lunday at 443-287-9960 or acl@jhu.edu. To speak with Cheng, contact Michael Buckley at 240-228-7536 or michael.buckley@jhuapl.edu.

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://releases.jhu.edu/
Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

Johns Hopkins astrophysicists Brice Ménard and Charles L. Bennett have been appointed to the Euclid Consortium, the international team of scientists overseeing an ambitious space telescope project designed to probe the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter. NASA, a partner in the mission, recently announced their selection to the research team for Euclid.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is leading the mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2020. A recent announcement about the ESA-NASA partnership stated that Euclid’s telescope and scientific instruments “will map the shape, brightness and 3D distribution of two billion galaxies covering more than a third of the whole sky and looking back over three-quarters of the history of the universe.”

Brice Ménard. Photo by Will Kirk/Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

“Euclid’s observations will produce a flood of data and will enable an impressive range of investigations,” said Ménard, a Johns Hopkins assistant professor of physics and astronomy. “This space telescope will be capable of mapping out a large fraction of the sky. It will provide us with detailed observations of more than a billion galaxies. It’s going to provide a gigantic new dataset. What we need to do now is to come up with strategies for analyzing that much material.”

The agencies hope this mapping process will yield important new information about the behavior of dark matter and dark energy. In gathering such data, Bennett said, “We’re trying to learn about the evolution of the universe and fundamental physics. We want to know more about what the universe is made of and how it is changing.”

Dark matter is distinguished by emitting no light, but it reveals itself through its gravitational effects, such as its ability to bend the path of light. Dark energy acts as “anti-gravity.” Earth’s gravity, for example, would cause a ball tossed into the air to fall back toward the ground. Dark energy, on the other hand, would cause the ball to pick up speed as it rises, accelerating upwards. Dark energy is thought to be responsible for the recently discovered acceleration of the expansion of the universe, as recognized by the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, which was awarded to three scientists, including Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins.

Charles L. Bennett. Photo by Will Kirk/Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Dark matter and dark energy are now known to be major ingredients in the makeup of the universe. NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) space mission, led by Bennett, recently determined that the universe is composed of 4.63 (plus or minus 0.24) percent atoms, 23.3 (plus or minus 2.3) percent dark matter and 72.1 (plus or minus 2.5) percent dark energy. Remarkably, several other measurements are consistent, and when data are combined improve the precision. However, the identity of the dark matter particles remains a mystery and scientists do not yet understand how dark energy changes with time or how it affects the evolution of the universe. The nature of dark energy has become one of the most fundamental questions in physics today, and scientists hope the upcoming space mission will help provide answers. “Indeed,” said Bennett, “what we call dark energy could be an indication of a failure of Einstein’s theory of gravity, one of the bedrock theories of physics.”

The Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy in Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Science has been at the forefront in this field, from its participation in the discovery of the Higgs boson candidate, to the Nobel Prize for discovering the accelerated expansion of the universe, to the measurement of the current expansion rate of the universe, and the precision measurements of the contents and history of the universe. In addition to leadership in the WMAP mission, Johns Hopkins participates in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Pan-STARRS. The university also is building part of the Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph and leading the construction of the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor.

“These experiments scan the sky in different ways to answer key questions about the nature of the universe,” Bennett said. “Euclid’s observations will push the exploration of the universe to new limits. Together with European colleagues, Brice and I will begin a multi-year process that could revolutionize our view of the cosmos.”

In addition to his faculty position at Johns Hopkins, Ménard is a joint member of the Kavli Institute for Physics and Mathematics at Tokyo University. He earned his doctorate from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany and the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. Before joining Johns Hopkins, he was a postdoctoral member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a senior research associate at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto. Last year, Ménard won a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and was named Maryland’s Outstanding Young Scientist of 2012.

Bennett is the university’s Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Johns Hopkins Gilman Scholar. He was awarded the 2012 Gruber Cosmology Prize, the 2010 Shaw Prize, the 2009 Comstock Prize in Physics, the 2006 Harvey Prize, and the 2006 Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2006, he shared the Peter Gruber Foundation’s Cosmology Prize with Nobel laureate John Mather and the Cosmic Background Explorer team. Bennett was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. He has received two NASA Exceptional Achievement medals and a NASA Outstanding Leadership medal.

Euclid is a European Space Agency mission with science instruments and data analysis provided by the Euclid consortium with important participation from NASA. NASA’s Euclid Project Office is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. JPL will contribute the infrared flight detectors for one of Euclid’s two science instruments. NASA Goddard will assist with infrared detector characterization and will perform detailed testing on flight detectors prior to delivery. Three U.S. science teams, led by JPL, Goddard and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech, will contribute to science planning and data analysis. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/euclid and http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=102 .

Color photos of professors Bennett and Ménard available, contact Phil Sneiderman.

Related links:

Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy: http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/

Charles L. Bennett’s Website: http://cosmos.pha.jhu.edu/bennett/

Brice Ménard’s Website: http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~menard/

Euclid Consortium Website: http://www.euclid-ec.org

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/. Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

Since its launch in 2001, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) space mission has revolutionized our view of the universe, establishing a cosmological model that explains a widely diverse collection of astronomical observations. Led by Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Charles L. Bennett, the WMAP science team has determined, to a high degree of accuracy and precision, not only the age of the universe, but also the density of atoms; the density of all other non-atomic matter; the epoch when the first stars started to shine; the “lumpiness” of the universe, and how that “lumpiness” depends on scale size.

In short, when used alone (with no other measurements), WMAP observations have made our knowledge of those six parameters above about 68,000 times more precise, thereby converting cosmology from a field of often wild speculation to a precision science.

Now, two years after the probe “retired,” Bennett and the WMAP science team are releasing its final results, based on a full nine years of observations.

“It is almost miraculous, says Bennett, Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Johns Hopkins Gilman Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “The universe encoded its autobiography in the microwave patterns we observe across the whole sky. When we decoded it, the universe revealed its history and contents. It is stunning to see everything fall into place.”

Charles L. Bennett

WMAP’s “baby picture of the universe” maps the afterglow of the hot, young universe at a time when it was only 375,000 years old, when it was a tiny fraction of its current age of 13.77 billion years. The patterns in this baby picture were used to limit what could have possibly happened earlier, and what happened in the billions of year since that early time. The (mis-named) “big bang” framework of cosmology, which posits that the young universe was hot and dense, and has been expanding and cooling ever since, is now solidly supported, according to WMAP.

WMAP observations also support an add-on to the big bang framework to account for the earliest moments of the universe. Called “inflation,” the theory says that the universe underwent a dramatic early period of expansion, growing by more than a trillion trillion-fold in less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Tiny fluctuations were generated during this expansion that eventually grew to form galaxies.

Remarkably, WMAP’s precision measurement of the properties of the fluctuations has confirmed specific predictions of the simplest version of inflation:  the fluctuations follow a bell curve with the same properties across the sky, and there are equal numbers of hot and cold spots on the map. WMAP also confirms the  predictions that the amplitude of the variations in the density of the universe on big scales should be slightly larger than smaller scales, and that the universe should obey the rules of Euclidean geometry so the sum of the interior angles of a triangle add to 180 degrees.

Recently, Stephen Hawking commented in New Scientist that WMAP’s evidence for inflation was the most exciting development in physics during his career.

The universe comprises only 4.6 percent atoms. A much greater fraction, 24 percent of the universe, is a different kind of matter that has gravity but does not emit any light — called “dark matter”. The biggest fraction of the current composition of the universe, 71%, is a source of anti-gravity (sometimes called “dark energy”) that is driving an acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

“WMAP observations form the cornerstone of the standard model of cosmology, “says Gary F. Hinshaw of the University of British Columbia, who is part of the WMAP science team. “Other data are consistent and when combined we now know precise values for the history, composition, and geometry of the universe.”

WMAP has also provided the timing of epoch when the first stars began to shine, when the universe was about 400 million old.  The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope is specifically designed to study that period that has added its signature to the WMAP observations.

WMAP launched on June 30, 2001 and maneuvered to its observing station near the “second Lagrange point” of the Earth-Sun system, a million miles from Earth in the direction opposite the sun. From there, WMAP scanned the heavens, mapping out tiny temperature fluctuations across the full sky.  The first results were issued in February 2003, with major updates in 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, and now this final release. The mission was selected by NASA in 1996, the result of an open competition held in 1995. It was confirmed for development in 1997 and was built and ready for launch only four years later, on-schedule and on-budget.

“The last word from WMAP marks the end of the beginning in our quest to understand the Universe,” comments fellow Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Adam G. Riess, whose discovery of dark energy led him to share the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. “WMAP has brought precision to cosmology and the Universe will never be the same.”

Related links:

A video of Bennett discussing WMAP results: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72Y0mvXsHS0

Bennett’s webpage: http://cosmos.pha.jhu.edu/bennett/

Hinshaw’s webpage: http://www.phas.ubc.ca/users/gary-hinshaw

Hawking on WMAP: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628965.700-2013-smart-guide-new-maps-to-rein-in-cosmic-inflation.html

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

Chia-Ling Chien, the Jacob L. Hain Professor of Physics and the Director of the Material Research Science and Engineering Center at The Johns Hopkins University, is a winner of the first-ever Asian Union of Magnetic Societies Award, recognizing his “seminal contribution to magnetic materials, nanostructures, magnetoelectronic phenomena and devices.”

Chien’s current research interests include fabrication of nanostructured materials and their structural, electronic, magnetic, and superconducting properties; highly spin polarized materials, spin-transfer torque effects, and magnetoelectronics.

“I have been very fortunate working with talented people.  Johns Hopkins allows me to do the research of my liking and pays me.  Occasionally, I even receive an award.  One can hardly ask for anything better,” said Chien.

Chia-Ling Chien

The Asian Union of Magnetics Societies (AUMS) was established in January 2009 to promote research, education, and application development in magnetism, magnetic materials, and magnetic devices. As part of his prize, Chien has been invited to speak at next year’s International Conference of the Asian Union of Magnetic Societies, held this year in Japan in early October.

Chien received his bachelors in physics from Tunghai University (Taiwan), and his master’s and Ph.D.s from Carnegie-Mellon University. Chien has published more than 400 papers in refereed journals and holds several patents. He is a fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is one of the most cited scientists, with more than 15,000 citations with an H-index of 61.  (The “h-index” is an index that measures the impact and productivity of a scientist published work by virtue of how often it is cited by other scientists in other publications.) He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He is also Honorary Professor at Nanjing University, Lanzhou University, and Fudan University in China. He is the 2004 recipient of the David Adler Award of the American Physical Society.  He is the 2005 Distinguished Lecturer of the Magnetics Society of IEEE.

“Prof. Chien is a world leader in the study of the physics of magnetic nanostructures,” said  Daniel Reich, chairman of the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “This prize is a fitting tribute for his many years of important contributions to this field.”

Also honored this year by the AUMS was Kazuhiro Ouchi, professor emeritus at Japan’s Akita Industrial Technology Center.

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Astrophysicist Brice Ménard of the Johns Hopkins University has been selected by the Maryland Academy of Sciences as the Outstanding Young Scientist of 2012. He received the award at a ceremony which was held at the Maryland Science Center yesterday. Ménard, an assistant professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, was recognized for his research in extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology.

The award program was established in 1959 to recognize and celebrate the extraordinary contributions of young Maryland researchers across all fields of science. Many previous recipients have gone on to distinguished scientific careers, including one who became a Nobel laureate.

“I am very honored to receive this award and I appreciate the efforts of the Maryland Academy of Sciences to encourage young scientists and increase public awareness of all the exciting science done in the area,” said Ménard.

Brice Ménard Photo by Will Kirk/Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Ménard came to Johns Hopkins in 2010 from the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, where he had worked as a senior research associate since 2006. His research — which involves statistical analyses of large astronomical data sets — aims to achieve a better understanding of how galaxies form and evolve, and how dark matter is distributed in space. His work has led to the detection of gravitational magnification by dark matter around galaxies, the discovery of tiny grains of dust in the intergalactic space, and a better understanding of how light rays propagate throughout the Universe.

He is a joint member of the Kavli Institute for Physics and Mathematics at Tokyo University. He earned his doctorate from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany and the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. Post-doctoral work was done at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In February, Ménard won a 2012 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and last year he was the recipient of the 2011 Henri Chrétien grant award by the American Astronomical Society. He currently teaches a course on data analysis attracting students from a variety of departments.

For more information about Ménard, go here:

http://archive.gazette.jhu.edu/2012/02/20/two-from-jhu-awarded-prestigious-sloan-research-fellowships/

http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~menard/

For more information about the Maryland Academy of Sciences, go here:

http://www.mdsci.org/programs/OYE_OYS/Main.html

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

Johns Hopkins University chemist Tyrel McQueen has been awarded a 2012 David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

The fellowship is one of 16 awarded each year nationwide, and bestows unrestricted funds of $875,000 (over a five-year period) to unusually creative young faculty members in science and engineering.

McQueen will use the award to continue his work toward discovering, designing and controlling materials with exotic electronic states of matter, with applications ranging from fundamental science to solving energy problems.

“I am delighted and honored to receive this award from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation,” said McQueen, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “I’m excited to see generous support for new materials synthesis and solid state chemistry, and the flexibility offered by these unrestricted funds will be invaluable to my research team as we pursue exotic new quantum phenomena in electronic materials.”

Tyrel McQueen

Katherine Newman, dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at the Johns Hopkins, considers the recognition well deserved.

“The Krieger School is enormously proud of the accomplishments of Professor McQueen and we look forward eagerly to the discoveries he will provide in the years to come,” she said. “I have had the personal pleasure of hearing him lecture undergraduates on his work and he conveys the kind of excitement that we want budding scientists to hear. We are grateful to the Packard Foundation for recognizing this rising star.”

McQueen, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins, earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Harvey Mudd College in 2004, a master’s degree from Princeton University in 2006 and a Ph.D. in chemistry and materials from Princeton in 2009. Later that year, he became a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before coming to The Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor of chemistry. He is a member of Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Quantum Matter, which is funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the US Department of Energy.

“This is tremendous news and we are all very excited for Tyrel and proud of his accomplishments,” said Gerald Meyer, chairman of the Department of Chemistry at The Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “The Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering support the nation’s most gifted and talented young professors in developing and expanding their research in science and engineering. To my knowledge, this is the first time that a faculty member in our department has ever received this prestigious fellowship. The funding will enable Tyrel and his research group to explore creative high risk experiments. It will be exciting to see what fascinating new science emerges from this fellowship.”

McQueen is a member of the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society and Sigma-Xi Scientific Research Society. Previous honors include a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2004-2009) and the 2012 Lange Lectureship for Outstanding Accomplishments in Materials Research from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation established its fellowships in 1988 to cultivate future scientific leaders.

For more information about McQueen, go here:

http://occamy.chemistry.jhu.edu/group/boss-cv.php

To learn more about the Packard Foundation and its fellowships, go here:

http://www.packard.org/what-we-fund/conservation-and-science/packard-fellowships-for-science-and-engineering/

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

Two Johns Hopkins University research scientists who use the Japanese art of paper folding, known as origami, as a metaphor for understanding the complexity of the cosmos have been named winners of an award through the “New Frontiers in Astronomy & Cosmology International Grant and Essay Writing Competition,” funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Mark Neyrinck and Miguel Aragón-Calvo, both of the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, were chosen from an international competition led by the University of Chicago’s Donald G. York to receive a grant to explore fundamental questions in astronomy and cosmology that engage groundbreaking ideas on the nature of the universe. Both scientists are part of Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES), a center led by fellow Johns Hopkins astrophysicist and computer scientist, Alexander Szalay, and aimed at developing new ways of building and analyzing huge data sets.

The researchers will receive their award at a conference October 12 and 13 at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute.

Mark Neyrinck

“It’s fantastic to get recognition and support for these fundamental issues of gravity on large scales,” said Neyrinck, the principal investigator on the grant. “In modern cosmology, sometimes it seems like it’s entirely about adding more digits to parameters. This is essential to do to determine what’s going on, but it’s important to push on the conceptual front, too.  The cosmic web is an area where there’s still much to be understood.”

The team’s work will address the question “What is the origin of the complexity in the universe?” with a new definition of the complexity residing in the “cosmic web” — the cellular, web-like arrangement of matter and galaxies in the universe. (See Aragón-Calvo’s poster at http://zoom.it/Boj2 )

This definition is related to an origami analogy of the cosmic web: the amount of complexity in a structure like a galaxy or filament of galaxies increases with the amount of “origami paper” that gets folded up to construct the structure.

Miguel Aragón-Calvo

The team will use this definition for the first all-inclusive quantitative measurement of the complexity, or entropy, in the cosmic web.  In modern theories of gravity, entropy is a subtle concept, but it seems to be of crucial importance. Fully understanding gravitational entropy may provide the key to the mystery of “dark energy,” the accelerated expansion of the universe, the co-discovery of which garnered Johns Hopkins professor Adam Riess a share of last year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.

York, of the University of Chicago, said “through these awards, the program aims to support bold, innovative research with the potential to expand boundaries and catalyze breakthrough discoveries, as well as inspire students to pursue scientific knowledge and become original, forward-looking big question thinkers of tomorrow.”

Origami “galaxies”

The awards mark the century celebration of the birth of Sir John Templeton, a philanthropist who regarded cosmology and astronomy as exemplary scientific pursuits that expanded humanity’s vision of the world. The conference has been timed, as well, to the 25^th anniversary of the establishment of The Templeton Foundation.

For a complete list of grant winners, see http://www.newfrontiersinastronomy.org/research-grant-program-recipients.html.

For more information about the awards, see www.newfrontiersinastronomy.org

For a more thorough description of Neyrinck and Aragon-Calvo’s work, see:

http://skysrv.pha.jhu.edu/~neyrinck/origalaxies.html

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

Supported by a five-year $7.4 million National Science Foundation grant, experts at The Johns Hopkins University are partnering with teachers and administrators in Baltimore City Public Schools on a program to enhance teaching and learning in science, technology, engineering and math in city elementary schools by making STEM a community affair.

The program, called STEM Achievement in Baltimore Elementary Schools – SABES for short — not only will benefit more than 1,600 students in grades three through five in nine city elementary schools, but could also become a national model for science, technology, engineering and math education.

“With this partnership, Johns Hopkins welcomes another opportunity to build on our collaborations with Baltimore City Public Schools to enhance the opportunities for students to excel in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education,” said Ronald J. Daniels, president of the university. “At Johns Hopkins, we are deeply committed to working with our partners in the Baltimore community to galvanize our many strengths and resources to serve city’s children and neighborhoods.”

The project will engage more than 40 city STEM teachers working with students in the communities of Greater Homewood, Lower Park Heights and Highlandtown/Greektown. Also involved will be parents, after-school care providers, local business people, community groups and experts from Johns Hopkins, the Maryland Science Center and the National Aquarium.

The program will provide high-quality professional development supported by Johns Hopkins engineering faculty for teachers. It will also include curricular enhancements and training to enable after-school program providers to augment STEM education by involving children in activities that have resonance in their communities. For instance, students studying the environment in class might work after school on clean water remediation or other projects that will impact their own neighborhoods.

“Our aim is that this partnership will build excitement around science, technology, engineering and mathematics in our communities and empower children and families to engage their world through these activities,” said Michael Falk, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering, and principal investigator for SABES. “Our hope is that this model could eventually be extended to other school systems around the country to foster STEM educational achievement among all students, including those of different ethnicities, language proficiencies and income levels.”

Katya Denisova, science content liaison for the Baltimore schools and a co-PI on the grant, sees the partnership as a tremendous opportunity for all involved – but especially for city school students.

“SABES is a very exciting project for the entire community of Baltimore City, from the teachers to the families and neighborhoods involved. But foremost, this is a big day for our students,” she said. “We see this as a fantastic opportunity to build a bridge for Baltimore City Public School students to the knowledge and expertise that will enable them to be successful in the 21^st century.”

Twice a year, the students will take part in STEM recognition events, where they will be able to present their works to stakeholders in the community, including teachers, parents and others. Teachers, too, will benefit from the community, collaborative approach by visiting each others’ classroom and meeting to devise and discuss best classroom practices, forming their own STEM “learning communities.”

During the grant’s first year, a team of planners will come together to outline the program in detail, and to get all community stakeholders involved. Over the next four years, all nine elementary schools will be brought on board, eventually reaching the targeted 1,600 students.

According to Falk, it’s vitally important to engage today’s elementary-age students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning at a high level in order to prepare them for the demands of the 21^st century job market.

“Nationally, we know that the jobs being created are jobs that require high amounts of skill with respect to science and mathematics,” Falk said. “By engaging students early, we hope that they are prepared to meet that need and participate in the modern workforce fully.”

Supporting partners include Greater Homewood Community Corp., Park Heights Renaissance, Inc., Southeast Community Development Corp., Greektown Community Development Corp., Education Based Latino Outreach and Child First Authority.

Use this link to view a video describing the Johns Hopkins-Baltimore City Public Schools partnership:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENXExkxe0NU

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

 NASA MEDIA CONTACT: J.D. Harrington
Headquarters, Washington
(202) 358-5241 (office)
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

JPL MEDIA CONTACT: Whitney Clavin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
(818) 354-4673 (office)
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

 With the combined power of NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes as well as a cosmic magnification effect, a team of astronomers led by Wei Zheng of The Johns Hopkins University has spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen. Light of the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories shone forth when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old.

The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called “Dark Ages.” During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy accordingly opens up a window into the deepest, remotest epochs of cosmic history.

“This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence,” said Zheng, a principal research scientist in The Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and lead author of a new paper appearing in Nature tomorrow. “Future work involving this galaxy – as well as others like it that we hope to find – will allow us to study the universe’s earliest objects and how the Dark Ages ended.”

Light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching NASA’s telescopes. In other words, the starlight snagged by Spitzer and Hubble left the galaxy when the universe was just 3.6 percent of its present age. Technically speaking, the galaxy has a redshift, of “z,” of 9.6. The term “redshift” refers to how much an object’s light has shifted into longer wavelengths as a result of the expansion of the universe. Astronomers use “redshift” to describe cosmic distances.

Unlike previous detections of galaxy candidates in this age range, which were only glimpsed in a single color, or waveband, this newfound galaxy has been seen in five different wavebands. As part of the Cluster Lensing And Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH) program, the Hubble space telescope registered the newly described, far-flung galaxy in four wavelength bands, and Spitzer in a fifth band via its Infrared Array Camera (IRAC), placing the discovery on firmer ground.

Objects at these extreme distances are mostly beyond the detection sensitivity of today’s largest telescopes. To catch sight of these early, distant galaxies, astronomers rely on “gravitational lensing.” In this phenomenon – predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago – the gravity of foreground objects warps and magnifies the light from background objects. A massive galaxy cluster situated between our galaxy and the early galaxy magnified the latter’s light, brightening the remote object some 15 times and bringing it into view.

Based on the Spitzer and Hubble observations, astronomers think the distant galaxy was spied at a time when it was less than 200 million years old. It also is small and compact, containing only about one percent of the Milky Way’s mass. According to leading cosmological theories, the first galaxies should indeed have started out tiny. They then progressively merged, eventually accumulating into the sizable galaxies of the more modern universe.

These first galaxies likely played the dominant role in the epoch of reionization, the event that signaled the demise of the universe’s Dark Ages. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, neutral hydrogen gas formed from cooling particles. The first luminous stars and their host galaxies, however, did not emerge until a few hundred million years later. The energy released by these earliest galaxies is thought to have caused the neutral hydrogen strewn throughout the universe to ionize, or lose an electron, a state which the gas has remained in since that time.

“In essence, during the epoch of reionization, the lights came on in the universe,” said paper co-author Leonidas Moustakas, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

Astronomers plan to study the rise of the first stars and galaxies and the epoch of reionization with the successor to both Spitzer and Hubble — NASA’s James Webb Telescope, slated for launch in 2018. The newly described, distant galaxy will likely be a prime target.

Holland Ford, one of Zheng’s colleagues and a co-author on the paper, commented on the findings.

“Science is very exciting when we explore the frontiers of knowledge. One of these frontiers is the first few hundred million years after the birth of our Universe. Dr. Zheng’s many years of searching for quasars and galaxies in the dawn of the universe has paid off with his discovery of a galaxy that we see as it was when the universe was less than 500 million years old,” said Ford, a physics and astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins. “With his discovery, we are seeing a galaxy when it was not even a toddler. But, this infant galaxy will in its future grow to be a galaxy like or own, hopefully hosting planetary systems with astronomers who will look back in time and see our galaxy in its infancy.”

More information about Zheng:

http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/people/res_staff/zheng_wei.html

More information about Spitzer and Hubble:

http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

The Gruber Foundation announced today that the 2012 Cosmology Prize will be awarded to Johns Hopkins University professor Charles L. Bennett and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) space mission science team that he led.

Bennett and the WMAP team are being recognized by the foundation for their transformative study of an ancient light dating back to the infant universe. So precise and accurate are the WMAP results that they form the foundation of the Standard Cosmological Model.

Bennett and the 26 member team will share the $500,000 prize. A gold medal will be presented to Bennett at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Beijing on August 21, and he will deliver a lecture on the 22nd.

“It is tremendously exciting to be recognized with the Gruber Cosmology Prize,” said Bennett, Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Gilman Scholar in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “I have been very fortunate to work with the talented and fine people of the WMAP team, and I am particularly delighted that our entire science team has been honored with this prestigious award.”

Charles L. Bennett Photo by Will Kirk/Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Under Bennett’s direction, the WMAP mission determined with unprecedented precision the age, shape (WMAP nailed down the curvature of space to within 0.6% of conventional Euclidean geometry), composition and history of the universe from the first-ever, exquisitely detailed full-sky “baby picture” of the universe, dating from when it was only 378,000 years old – 13.75 billion years ago. Using this picture, the team determined that the universe consists of 72.8 percent dark energy, 22.7 percent dark matter and 4.6 percent atoms. The team also concluded that the first stars formed when the universe was only about 400 million years old. The WMAP data substantiated key predictions of the cosmic inflation paradigm that describes the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of the universe, while at the same time ruling out some specific implementations of the theory. WMAP data also place limits on the mass of the neutrino (an elementary particle with no electrical charge and travels at almost the speed of light), and provide evidence for primordial helium, consistent with big bang theory predictions.

“Chuck Bennett and the WMAP team put the ‘precision’ in the new field of precision cosmology, and set the ‘standard’ for the Standard Cosmological Model,” said fellow Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Adam Riess, who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in astrophysics, as well as the Gruber Prize in 2007, for his finding that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

The annual Gruber Cosmology Prize recognizes “fundamental advances in our understanding of the universe,” according to the foundation’s website. The Cosmology Prize is co-sponsored by the International Astronomical Union and aims to acknowledge and encourage further exploration.

This is the second time that Bennett has been honored by the Gruber Foundation. In 2006, the Prize was awarded to NASA’s John Mather and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) team, of which Bennett was a member. The WMAP team honored this year includes Johns Hopkins associate research scientists David Larson and Janet Weiland. Throughout his career Bennett has made significant contributions to the knowledge of cosmology through pioneering measurements of the cosmic background radiation, the oldest light in the universe and a remnant of the hot, young universe. For this research, Bennett has received many previous accolades, including the 2010 Shaw Prize, the 2009 Comstock Prize in Physics, the 2006 Harvey Prize, the 2005 Draper Medal, the 1992 and 2004 NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award,  the 2003 NASA Outstanding Leadership Award.

More about Bennett:

http://cosmos.pha.jhu.edu/bennett/

More about the Gruber Foundation:

http://www.gruberprizes.org/

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

FROM: Lisa DeNike/443-845-3148 (cell) and 443-287-9960 (office) or Lde@jhu.edu

RE: Johns Hopkins hosts a viewing of the transit of Venus

WHEN: beginning at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 5

WHERE: Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy, 3799 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, 21218

In the late afternoon and early evening of Tuesday, June 5, a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle will unfold in the heavens: Venus will slowly travel across the face of the Sun.

This phenomenon happens only once every 130 years, so the Maryland Space Grant Observatory and Johns Hopkins University are inviting star gazers of every experience level to an event that not only will allow them to view the transit, but also to learn more about it.

At 5 p.m., Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist Adam Riess, professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, and Peter McCullough, associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, will each give a short talk in Schafler Auditorium about the importance of transits in cosmology and astronomy.

From 6 p.m. until sunset, observers can watch the transit unfold in one of several ways. The Space Grant Observatory’s telescope will be open, and will project the transit onto paper to protect viewers’ eyes. In addition, several personal, smaller telescopes also will be set up on the roof of the Bloomberg Center for people’s use. Finally, as the astronomical event unfolds, it will be projected onto a screen in the Schafler Auditorium during a live feed from Hawaii.

All events will be held in the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy on the Homewood campus.

For directions to the Homewood campus and a map, go here:

http://webapps.jhu.edu/jhuniverse/information_about_hopkins/visitor_information/

For more information about the Maryland Space Grant Consortium and Observatory, go here:

http://md.spacegrant.org/index.php?page=maryland-space-grant-observatory

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases are available at the same address.