News from The Johns Hopkins University » astrophysics

Researchers Explain Magnetic Field Misbehavior in Solar Flares: The Culprit is Turbulence

phil — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:38:49 +0000

May 22, 2013
Media Contact: Phil Sneiderman
Office: (443) 287-9960
Cell: (410) 299-7462
prs@jhu.edu

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 .

JHU Cosmologists Receive “New Frontiers” Award for Work on “Origami Universe”

Tracey Reeves — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 17:00:13 +0000

October 4, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa De Nike
(443)-287-9960 (office)
(443) 845-3148 (cell)
Lde@jhu.edu

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

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.

Media Advisory: Observe the Transit of Venus at Johns Hopkins University Astrophysics Event

Tracey Reeves — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 16:43:36 +0000

TO: Assignment editors, reporters, producers

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 Led WMAP Mission Scores World’s Most Cited Science Publications in 2011

Tracey Reeves — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:36:09 +0000

April 16, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa De Nike
(443)-287-9960 (office)
(443)-845-3148 (cell)
Lde@jhu.edu

All three of the most highly cited scientific papers in the world published in 2011 were from an astrophysics space mission project led by a Johns Hopkins University scientist, according to Thomson Reuters’ Science Watch.

The papers cite results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a NASA spacecraft launched in 2001 that has revolutionized our knowledge of the history, composition, and geometry of the universe. The WMAP mission is led by Charles L. Bennett, Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Johns Hopkins Gilman Scholar at the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University.

Science Watch’s website notes: “Although the spacecraft has now gone silent at the end of its mission, rafts of scientists are poring over the accumulated data, including the seven-year observations released last year.”

WMAP determined the 13.7 billion year age of the universe to within 1%, and that atoms make up only 4.6% of the universe, and that some kind of an anti-gravity energy makes up a whopping 73% of the universe. The 2003 WMAP results were Science Magazine’s “breakthrough of the year.”

“It is astounding how far science has taken us. We are even able to rule out some proposed theories of

Charles L. Bennett

what happened in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of the universe,” says Bennett. “Despite the many discoveries, many questions remain. I am confident that future measurements will reveal even more in the coming years.”

This is not the first time that WMAP results were among the most cited scientific papers in the world across all scientific disciplines, not just in physics and astronomy. It also happened in 2003, 2007, and 2009. This time WMAP captured the first, second, and third spots in the rankings in a single year – a science trifecta.

“These rankings are evidence of the great impact and reach of the physics and astronomy faculty here at Johns Hopkins,” said Daniel Reich, chairman of the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins.

Bennett came to Johns Hopkins on Jan. 1, 2005 from his previous position as a senior scientist for experimental cosmology at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2010, Bennett’s work on WMAP made him a co-winner of the prestigious Shaw Prize. Bennett won the Comstock Prize in Physics in 2009, the Harvey Prize in 2006 and the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. In 2006, he shared the Peter Gruber Foundation’s Cosmology Prize with Nobel laureate John Mather and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) team.

Bennett was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. He received two NASA Exceptional Achievement medals and a NASA Outstanding Leadership medal.

Related websites:

Science Watch:

http://sciencewatch.com/newsletter/2012/201203/hottest_research_2012/

Charles L. Bennett:

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

NASA’s WMAP site:

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/

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Media Advisory: Johns Hopkins University 9th Annual Physics Fair 2012: Saturday, April 21

Tracey Reeves — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:53:08 +0000

April 10, 2012

MEDIA ADVISORY

Johns Hopkins University 9^th Annual Physics Fair 2012: Saturday, April 21

To: Education and science reporters, calendar editors, weekend assignment editors

From: Lisa De Nike / 443-287-9960/ LDE@jhu.edu

Re: Physics Fair at The Johns Hopkins University, 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 21

The Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University is hosting its 9th Annual Physics Fair from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 21, 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.

The fair started within a program called QuarkNet, organized by the National Science Foundation to encourage university professors working in elementary particle physics research to incorporate high school teachers into their research programs. The teachers who became involved suggested that a Physics Fair would be a good way to connect with students and the public.

Highlights of the event particularly suited to photographers and camera crews include:

Professor Extraordinaire Shows, 12: 15 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. Johns Hopkins physicist

Peter Armitage

Peter Armitage (also known as “Professor Extraordinaire”) and his assistants will give a demonstration that will include explosions, fantastic displays, bright lights and loud noises.

Elementary-Middle School Science Bowl Competitions, 1:30 p.m. Teams of up to four elementary school-age students (grades 1 through 8) will compete to answer a variety of general science-related questions in a quiz show format. This activity will be held in Bloomberg’s Schafler Auditorium, which is equipped with a system allowing contestants to press buttons to select their answers, with the results being displayed in real time. Winning teams receive trophies for their schools.

High School Science Bowl and Physics Bowl Competitions, 2:15 and 3 p.m. Teams of up to four high school students will compete in answering physics and science-related questions in a quiz show format. The results will be displayed in real time. Winning teams will receive prizes, such as trophies and books. The bowls are limited to 30 teams. A team can make a reservation by calling 410-516-7346, or can enter at the Fair itself.

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.

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. Lectures and displays about the Hubble Space Telescope program also are offered.

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NASA’s Hubble Detects One of the Most Distant Supernovae Yet Observed

phil — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:33:59 +0000

January 11, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JOHNS HOPKINS MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa De Nike
(443)-287-9960 (office); (443) 845-3148 (cell)
Lde@jhu.edu

SPACE TELESCOPE MEDIA CONTACT: Ray Villard
(410) 338-4514
Villard@stsci.edu

A team of Johns Hopkins astrophysicists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected a distant Type Ia supernova, the farthest stellar explosion that can be used to measure the expansion rate of the universe. The supernova is the remnant of a star that exploded 9 billion years ago. The sighting is the first finding of an ambitious survey that will help astronomers place better constraints on the nature of dark energy: a mysterious repulsive force that is causing the universe to fly apart ever faster.

The object, nicknamed SN Primo, belongs to a special class called Type Ia supernovae, which are bright beacons used as distance markers for studying the expansion rate of the universe. Type Ia supernovae most likely arise when white dwarf stars, the burned-out cores of normal stars, siphon too much material from their companion stars and explode.

The study has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and the results will be presented today (Jan. 11) at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, by first author Steven Rodney, post-doctoral researcher in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University. Teaming with Rodney was lead investigator Adam Riess, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins and a 2011 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, due to a mysterious force now known as “dark energy.”

According to Rodney, SN Primo is the farthest Type Ia supernova whose distance has been confirmed through spectroscopic observations. A spectrum splits the light from a supernova into its constituent colors. By analyzing those colors, astronomers can confirm its distance by measuring how much the supernova’s light has been stretched, or red-shifted, into near-infrared wavelengths due to the expansion of the universe.

The supernova was discovered as part of a three-year Hubble program to survey faraway Type Ia supernovae, enabling searches for this special class of stellar explosion at greater distances than previously possible. The remote supernovae will help astronomers determine whether the exploding stars remain dependable distance markers across vast distances of space in an epoch when the cosmos was only one-third its current age of 13.7 billion years.

Called the CANDELS+CLASH Supernova Project, the census uses the sharpness and versatility of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to look in regions targeted by two large Hubble programs: Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) and the Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH).

“In our search for supernovae, we had gone as far as we could go in optical light,” said Riess. “But it’s only the beginning of what we can do in infrared light. This discovery demonstrates that we can use the Wide Field Camera 3 to search for supernovae in the distant universe.”

The supernova team’s search technique involved taking multiple near-infrared images over several months, looking for a supernova’s faint glow. Once the team spotted SN Primo in October 2010, they used WFC3’s spectrometer to verify its distance and to decode its light, finding the unique signature of a Type Ia supernova. The team then re-imaged SN Primo periodically for eight months, measuring the slow dimming of its light.

By taking the census, the astronomers hope to determine the frequency of Type Ia supernovae during the early universe and glean insights into the mechanisms that detonated them.

“If we look into the early universe and measure a drop in the number of supernovae, then it could be that it takes a long time to make a Type Ia supernova,” said Rodney. “Like corn kernels in a pan waiting for the oil to heat up, the stars haven’t had enough time at that epoch to evolve to the point of explosion. However, if supernovae form very quickly, like microwave popcorn, then they will be immediately visible, and we’ll find many of them, even when the universe was very young. But each supernova is unique. It’s possible that there are multiple ways to make a supernova.”

If astronomers discover that Type Ia supernovae begin to depart from how they expect them to look, they might be able to gauge those changes and make the measurements of dark energy more precise. Riess and two other astronomers shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering dark energy 13 years ago, using Type Ia supernova to plot the universe’s expansion rate.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, D.C.

For images and more information about the study, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

Riess’s web pages:
http://www.stsci.edu/~ariess/

http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/people/faculty/riess_adam.html

Rodney’s web page: http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~srodney/srodney/Home.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.

NSF $1.2 Million Grant to Fund Massive Data “Pipeline” at Johns Hopkins

Tracey Reeves — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:53:14 +0000

November 7, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa De Nike
(443)-287-9960 (office)
(443) 845-3148 (cell)
Lde@jhu.edu

Financed by a $1.2 million National Science Foundation grant, one of the world’s fastest and most advanced scientific computer networks—one capable of transferring in and out of The Johns Hopkins University per day the amount of data equivalent to 80 million file cabinets filled with text—will be built on the university’s Homewood campus, with support from the University of Maryland, College Park.

The grant was announced last week by U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, who is chair of the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Committee.

The network will allow for the transfer and analysis of the kind of complex and massive datasets being produced today in scientific fields such as astrophysics, medical research, genomics and turbulence modeling, according to Johns Hopkins physicist and computer scientist Alexander Szalay, one of the lead researchers on the new grant.

“Computer science has drastically altered the way we do science and the science that we do, and this networking capability is a crucial part of that,” said Szalay, the Alumni Centennial Professor in the Krieger School’s Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy and director of Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science. “This NSF-funded network will be one of the nation’s first public 100 gigabit per second Internet connections and will allow us to move data sets thousands of times bigger than we previously thought possible. Johns Hopkins will finally have world-class computing facilities.”

This installation, supported by the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, will allow Johns Hopkins to receive huge data sets from Google, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, among others, according to Szalay, who is the co-principal investigator on the grant with Jonathan Bagger and Mark Robbins, both professors in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins.

Alex Szalay Photo by Will Kirk/Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

The new system will be housed in a powerful, energy-efficient computing center in the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy on the Homewood campus, in a space that once served as the mission control center for NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer satellite. This renovation and transformation is being supported by a $1.3 million stimulus grant administered through the National Science Foundation.

Housed in the new space will be the Homewood High-Performance Cluster, which brings together the resources of investigators in both the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering to create a powerful and adaptive co-op facility that is designed to support large-scale computations on the Homewood campus.

Also housed in the new center will be the Data-Scope, a powerful cluster of computers capable of handling colossal sets of information. The cluster will be able to handle five petabytes of information, which is the equivalent of 66.5 years of HDTV data. (To put this in context, 50 petabytes would equal the entire written work of humankind, from the beginning of history until now, in all languages.)

The new apparatus will allow Johns Hopkins researchers—not to mention those at other institutions, including universities and national laboratories such as Los Alamos and Oak Ridge—to conduct research directly in the database.

“This new National Science Foundation grant will facilitate lightning-fast connections to the Internet, which together with our new NSF-funded computer facility, will allow Johns Hopkins researchers to lengthen their lead in data-intensive science and engineering,” Bagger said.

The network will be supported by the regional Mid-Atlantic Crossroads research and engineering network at the University of Maryland, College Park. About $950,000 of the grant money comes directly to Johns Hopkins, and the remaining $250,000 goes to the University of Maryland. This will enable Mid-Atlantic Crossroads to upgrade the equipment connecting their Internet hub to Johns Hopkins.

Computing at Johns Hopkins:

http://gazette.jhu.edu/2010/11/01/a-seismic-leap-for-science/

http://gazette.jhu.edu/2010/10/25/a-space-switch-on-land/

http://idies.jhu.edu/

http://idies.jhu.edu/hpc.aspx

http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/people/faculty/szalay.html

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

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

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Johns Hopkins Astronomer Wins 2011 Balzan Prize

Tracey Reeves — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 16:04:50 +0000

September 12, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa De Nike
(office) 443-287-9960
(cell) 443-845-3148
Lde@jhu.edu

Johns Hopkins University astronomer Joseph Silk has been awarded the 2011 Balzan Prize, for his pioneering work on the infant universe. The $950,000 award is given annually to people or organizations that have made outstanding achievements in the fields of the natural sciences, humanities and culture, as well as for peace-promoting endeavors.

Silk, a research professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy in Johns Hopkins’ Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, will be presented with his prize by the International Balzan Prize Foundation in a ceremony on November 18 in Berne, Switzerland. The foundation is located in both Zurich and Milan.

Joseph Silk

“We have made immense progress in early universe studies since I began my research career,” said Silk, who was honored for his project The Early Universe (From the Planck Time to the First Galaxies). “The major advance that has impacted my research is the measurement of the initial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. These characterize the seeds of galaxy formation. But we still have a long way to go, both in terms of observation and theory, before we can say that we fully understand the evolution of cosmic structure.”

Silk was recognized for his work on the early universe, and his research into the effects of various physical processes and phenomena, including dark matter and the fluctuations of the Cosmic Background Radiation.

He was born in London in 1942 and has studied at Cambridge and Harvard, been a postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge and Princeton, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Oxford. He has written or co-authored more than 500 publications.

“Dr. Silk is one of the world’s leading theoretical astrophysicists,” said Daniel Reich, chair of the Physics Department in Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School. “Over a research career spanning more than 40 years he has made numerous major contributions to the study of cosmology, galaxy and star formation, and dark matter. His work has informed and motivated many of the crucial experiments done over this time in these fields. This award is richly deserved.”

The International Balzan Prize Foundation was established in 1978 by the family of Eugenio Balzan, a journalist who made Switzerland his home after fleeing fascist oppression of the media in his native Italy. It focuses on fields that may often be overlooked by other foundations.

Renowned Theoretical Physicist Marc Kamionkowski Joins Johns Hopkins Faculty

Tracey Reeves — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:49:07 +0000

June 27, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa De Nike
443-287-9960
Lde@jhu.edu

Marc Kamionkowski, considered one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists for his work in large-scale structures and the early history of the universe, will join the faculty in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences on July 1. An endowed professor at California Institute of Technology, Kamionkowski has spent much of his career researching astrophysics, cosmology and elementary particle theory.

“Dr. Kamionkowki’s research spans the boundary between particle physics and astrophysics and is directly relevant to much of what our department is already working on,” said Daniel Reich, chair of the department. “He is a perfect fit for us.”

The Robinson Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech since 1999, Kamionkowski has worked on particle dark matter, inflation and cosmic acceleration, as well as neutrino and nuclear physics and astrophysics, large-scale-structure and galaxy formation, gravitational lensing, alternative gravity theories, phase transitions in the early universe, the epoch of reionization, the first stars and high-energy and stellar astrophysics.

Marc Kamionkowski

“Johns Hopkins has a number of great people in physics and astronomy who I have long known and admired, and I am looking forward to joining their ranks,” Kamionkowski said.

A native of Cleveland, Kamionkowski earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1987 from Washington University and his doctorate from The University of Chicago in 1991. He spent three years in postdoctoral studies at the Institute for Advanced Study and joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1994.

Kamionkowski is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He won the Department of Energy’s Ernest O. Lawrence Award in High Energy and Nuclear Physics in 2006, and was named the Department of Energy’s Outstanding Junior Investigator for 1998-1999. In 1998, he won the American Astronomical Society’s Helen B. Warner Prize and was named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow each year from 1996 to 1998.

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“Oddball” Star Cluster is a Hybrid, JHU Astronomer Finds

Tracey Reeves — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:55:19 +0000

June 1, 2011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa De Nike
443-287-9960
Lde@jhu.edu

Scientists will tell you that the romantic idea is factually true: we are made of the same stuff as stars. In fact, all chemical elements heavier than helium are made in the stars, and research into how the universe became enriched in these “metals” is the focus of much current research in astronomy. Astronomers tend to call these elements “metals,” though many are not metals in the usual sense.

One thing astrophysicists agree on is that each successive generation of stars should be more enriched in metals than the previous generations. The massive stars that create much of the metals live for only a short time, and when they die, they spit out or eject the metals they have created. The expelled metals become part of the raw material out of which the next stars are formed. Thus, there is a relationship between the age of a star and how much metal it contains: old stars have a lower metallicity than do younger ones. Less massive stars live longer than higher mass stars, so low mass stars from early generations still survive today and are studied extensively.

Indeed, it was found decades ago that there are two distinct classes of star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy: very old, metal-poor ones – called “globular clusters” — and younger, metal-rich ones – called “open clusters.” It is believed that the sun itself originated from an open star cluster that dissolved long ago. In general, the properties of globular and open clusters are very different.

And yet, according to Johns Hopkins astronomer Imants Platais, there is one case which has puzzled astronomers for decades: a well-known, seemingly open star cluster in the constellation of Lyra, named NGC 6791.

“This cluster is about twice the age of the sun and is unusually metal rich (at least twice the Sun’s metallicity),” said Platais, of the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy’s Center for Astrophysical Sciences. “A couple of decades ago, it was also found that NGC 6791 contains a handful of very hot but somewhat dim stars, called hot subdwarfs. The presence of such stars in an open cluster is rare, though not unique.”

Prompted by the many unusual characteristics of NGC 6791, a team led by Platais and Kyle Cudworth from The University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory proceeded to obtain as complete a census of stars in this cluster as possible.

They achieved this by measuring proper motions of nearly 60 thousand stars in the vicinity of the cluster. While casual Milky Way stars move across the sky somewhat randomly in all directions, the cluster stars stay together and “march” like a formation of soldiers. Using this pattern of motion and measuring the brightness and color of stars, they separated cluster member stars from other stars which happen to lie in the same direction in space, but are not cluster members.

From this census, they discovered that NGC 6791 contains several luminous stars apparently belonging to the so-called classical horizontal branch; stars which normally are found only in globular clusters significantly older than this cluster. The hot subdwarfs are confirmed to be cluster members, but they now appear to be simply the bluest horizontal branch stars. Unlike a typical globular cluster, however, NGC 6791 contains simultaneously both red and very blue horizontal branch stars.

This adds to the peculiarities previously known of being both metal rich and old. Thus, NGC 6791 is the first known star cluster juxtaposing the properties of open and globular clusters and, as such, represents a new class of star clusters, which likely originated in the central Bulge region of the Milky Way. Essentially, this new work – which appeared in the May 20 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters – has revealed the hybrid nature of this star cluster in our Galaxy.

“Star clusters are the building blocks of galaxies and we believe that all stars, including our own sun, are born in clusters. NGC 6791 is a real oddball among about 2,000 known open and globular star clusters in the Milky Way and as such provides a new challenge and a new opportunity, to our understanding of how stars form and evolve,” said Platais, who presented this work last week at the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Boston.

Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation’s Stellar Astronomy and Astrophysics program. Two other major contributors to the success of this project were the Kitt Peak National Observatory’s Mayall 4-Meter Telescope and the Canada France Hawaii (3.6-meter) Telescope.

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Online Universe Wins AAAS Website Award

Tracey Reeves — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:48:13 +0000

August 26, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa De Nike
443-287-9960
Lde@jhu.edu

A website that brings the universe into the homes and onto the computer screens of professional and amateur astronomers alike has won a Science Prize for Online Resources in Education, known as SPORE, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Built by a Johns Hopkins University team led by astrophysicist and computer scientist Alexander Szalay, the SkyServer search tool of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s database makes more than 350 million stars and galaxies available to students, teachers and the public. SkyServer’s MapQuest-like interface allows them to pan through the sky, zoom in and out, and click on stars and galaxies for more information.

“The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has made its entire dataset available through this online portal for public use in education,” said Szalay, the Alumni Centennial Professor in the Krieger School’s Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy. “This is a unique opportunity for students, teachers and the public to learn about astronomy. Basically, anyone with Internet access can now interact with the data in the same way that professional scientists do.”

Alexander Szalay

The most ambitious astronomical survey ever taken, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-which began in 1991 and involved hundreds of scientists around the world-is sometimes described as astronomy’s equivalent of the Human Genome Project. When complete, it will provide detailed optical images covering more than a quarter of the sky, as well as a three-dimensional map of millions of galaxies and quasars. The development of SkyServer, in particular, benefited greatly from Szalay’s collaboration with Jim Gray of Microsoft Research, who worked with the Johns Hopkins team on that and several other large-scale, high-performance scientific databases.

The SDSS website (www.sdss.org) gives browsers access to a three-dimensional map of the entire universe, including the brightest 1 million stars and quasars. This data is fed into the website by a dedicated 2.5 meter diameter SDSS telescope that uses a 120 megapixel camera in New Mexico to image the entire night sky, 1.5 square degrees of sky at a time (about eight times the area of the full moon). The goal of the survey is to address fundamental questions about the universe by looking at large-scale patterns of the galaxies. Astrophysicists have many theories about how the universe came into being and evolved, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is aimed at telling scientists which theories are correct, or whether they must come up with completely new ones.

Using the SkyServer search tool, users can visually explore the heavens and sort through the reams of data available on the SDSS site, Szalay said.

“SkyServer users can pan through the sky, zoom in and out, and click on stars and galaxies for more information, such as the galaxy’s brightness or its position in the sky,” Szalay said. “There also are tools that let any user examine SDSS data on any object. It’s truly amazing.”

SkyServer also provides middle school, high school and college students with a series of suggested science projects, complete with Excel spreadsheet templates to make data analysis easier. Topics of the projects include understanding why stars have different colors, classifying stellar spectra and examining the expansion of the universe. These projects were designed by Johns Hopkins team member Jordan Raddick, who wrote about the educational value of the website in the Aug. 27 issue of Science, which announced the award.

“SkyServer provides an opportunity for teachers, students and the public to learn about astronomy interactively, which we know from education research is extremely effective and important,” Raddick said. “This website and its tools allow anyone with Internet access to interact with the SDSS data in the way real scientists do, which is remarkable.”

Over the last six years, the SDSS has been named several times as being among the most-used astronomy database facilities in the world, based upon an analysis of astronomy journal citations presented yearly at the meetings of the American Astronomical Society.

“The bottom line is that this is the way astronomy is being done in the 21st century. Scientists don’t have to compete for time on expensive telescopes-they simply dial up the sky on their computers,” Szalay said. “It’s wonderful to be recognized for our work on the SkyServer, but in truth this award reflects the amazing work of hundreds of astrophysicists and astronomers and computer scientists over the last two decades.”

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Astrophysicist is Co-Winner of Million-Dollar Shaw Prize

Dennis O'Shea — Thu, 27 May 2010 12:36:10 +0000

May 27, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa De Nike
443-287-9960
Lde@jhu.edu

Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Charles Bennett and two colleagues today were awarded this year’s $1 million Shaw Prize in astronomy for groundbreaking research that has helped determine the precise age, composition and curvature of the universe.

Charles Bennett, co-winner of the 2010 Shaw Prize for astronomy (Credit: Will Kirk/JHU)

Bennett was cited for his accomplishments as principal investigator of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, a spacecraft which in less than a decade has added significantly to our knowledge of the universe’s history and structure. WMAP, launched in 2001, observes and measures the cosmic background radiation, the oldest light in the universe.

Bennett and his colleagues, both from Princeton University, will accept the award in a ceremony Sept. 28 in Hong Kong. Sometimes referred to as the “Nobel Prize of the East,” the Shaw Prize was established by Run Run Shaw, a philanthropist and longtime leader in the Hong Kong film and television industry. It has been awarded annually since 2002 in three fields: astronomy, life science and medicine, and mathematical sciences.

Bennett is the second Johns Hopkins researcher to win a Shaw Prize in the seven-year existence of the award. Adam Riess, like Bennett a member of the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy in the university’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, was a co-winner in 2006 for the discovery of dark energy.

“I am deeply grateful for this honor,” Bennett said. “The WMAP space mission has been an extraordinary adventure for me. The exciting measurements reveal the age, composition, and history of our universe. These accurate and precise results were only possible because of the hard work of the talented and dedicated WMAP team.”

Co-winners of the 2010 astronomy prize with Bennett are Princeton astrophysicists David Spergel and Lyman Page, both members of the WMAP team.

In 2003, Bennett and the WMAP team made international news with their announcement that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and is constituted of less than 5 percent atoms, one quarter dark matter and nearly three-quarters a mysterious, dark energy. WMAP’s results also support the view that the cosmos grew from subatomic size to astronomical scale in less time than it takes to blink your eye. Bennett’s team has continued to make headlines in the years since, as these conclusions were further bolstered with more data. In 2009, WMAP reports were the most cited scientific papers in the world.

WMAP was Science magazine’s “breakthrough of the year” in 2003.

Bennett previously served as deputy principal investigator on NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, which was launched in 1989 and which provided evidence in support of the big bang theory.

In addition to the Shaw Prize, Bennett won the Comstock Prize in Physics in 2009, the Harvey Prize by the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in 2006 and the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. In 2006, he also shared the Peter Gruber Foundation’s Cosmology Prize with Nobel laureate John Mather, also of the COBE team.

Bennett was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. He received two NASA Exceptional Achievement medals and a NASA Outstanding Leadership medal. He is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Digital photos of Bennett are available. Contact the Office of News & Information at 443-287-9960.

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JHU Astrophysicist and Team Win $5 Million Stimulus Grant to Build Telescope

Tracey Reeves — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:01:13 +0000

March 15, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: Lisa De Nike
443-287-9960
Lde@jhu.edu

A team led by Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Charles L. Bennett has won a $5 million National Science Foundation grant – administered through the stimulus act – to build an instrument designed to probe what happened during the universe’s first trillionth of a second, when it suddenly grew from submicroscopic to astronomical size in far less than time than it takes to blink your eye.

The instrument, which is expected to require five years to build, will have the capability to measure the “cosmic microwave background radiation” over large swaths of the sky, according to Bennett, professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

After being built in Maryland, the ground-based telescope will be shipped to a perch in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Charles Bennett and graduate students Joseph Eimer and Lingzhen Zeng in the Bloomberg Center space where they will build the ground-based instrument called CLASS. Photo: Will Kirk/Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

“Miraculously enough, it is within our ability as humans to probe back into the first moments of the universe and learn what happened then,” said Bennett, a member of the National Academy of Sciences who has won several prestigious honors, including the 2009 Comstock Prize in Physics, the 2006 Harvey Prize, and the 2005 Henry Draper Medal.

Starting with his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite and continuing by leading the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, also known as WMAP, space mission, Bennett’s career has been spent probing the cosmic microwave background, which is the remnant afterglow light which lingers, much cooled, from the universe’s energetic beginnings 13.7 billion years ago. In fact, in 2009, papers about WMAP were the most cited scientific papers in the world across all scientific disciplines, and not just in physics and astronomy.

Called the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor, or CLASS, the new instrument is expected to search the microwave sky for a unique polarization pattern, predicted to have arisen in the infant universe. More specifically, the telescope will help researchers determine the veracity of a theory called “inflation,” which posits that the universe expanded from infinitesimal to astronomical in size in an astonishingly short time.

“This burst left ripples – what we call ‘gravitational waves’ – in the fabric of space and those ripples in space cause the cosmic background light to be polarized in a particular and unique kind of pattern. Looking at that pattern will tell us if the inflation idea is right – or wrong! And the details of what we see will inform us about what kind of inflation happened,” Bennett explained.

Bennett, his colleagues and his students are hard at work developing the state-of-the-art technologies needed for the instrument, which will be built in the basement of the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy on the Homewood campus.

“Thanks to my graduate students, Joseph Eimer and Lingzhen Zeng, we were ready when this opportunity arose,” says Bennett. “We are really building (the instrument), screwdrivers and all.”

The project is expected to support an additional 39 full-time employees, plus graduate students, over the course of the five-year grant.

Bennett’s team’s investigations are among the more than 364 stimulus-funded research grants and supplements totaling almost $180 million that Johns Hopkins has garnered since Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (informally known by the acronym ARRA), bestowing the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation with $12.4 billion in extra money to underwrite research grants by September 2010. The stimulus package—which provided $550 billion in new spending, including the above grants—is part of the federal government’s attempt to bring back a stumbling economy by distributing dollars for transportation projects, infrastructure building, the development of new energy sources and job creation, and financing research that will benefit humankind.

Johns Hopkins scientists have submitted about 1,300 proposals for stimulus-funded investigations, ranging from strategies to help recovering addicts stay sober and the role that certain proteins play in the development of muscular dystrophy to mouse studies seeking to understand how men and women differ in their response to the influenza virus.

To date, 117 staff jobs have been created at Johns Hopkins directly from ARRA funding, not counting jobs saved when other grants ran out and not counting faculty and graduate student positions supported by ARRA grants.

Digital photographs of Bennett are available by contacting Lisa De Nike at Lde@jhu.edu or 443-287-9960.