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Recent News

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Monday, November 08, 2021

Announcing the McWilliams/PSC Seed Grant 2021 Recipients

The McWilliams Center for Cosmology and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) are excited to announce the recipients of their seed grant program to support faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff who want to explore a new area of research or jumpstart their research activity.
Tuesday, September 07, 2021

Yueying Ni Wins McWilliams Fellowship

Physics Ph.D. candidate Yueying Ni has received the Bruce McWilliams Graduate Fellowship, which provides support to a MCS graduate student studying in an area where Carnegie Mellon has a comparative advantage and where research is at an emerging or critical stage.
Wednesday, August 25, 2021

Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington to Pioneer Platforms that Harness Astrophysical Data to Unravel the Universe’s Mysteries

Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington have announced an expansive, multi-year collaboration to create new software platforms to analyze large astronomical datasets generated by the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which will be carried out by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in northern Chile.
Thursday, May 27, 2021

Dark Energy Survey Releases Most Precise Look at the Universe’s Evolution

New results from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) used the largest ever sample of galaxies over an enormous piece of the sky to produce the most precise measurements of the universe’s composition and growth to date. Scientists measured that the way matter is distributed throughout the universe is consistent with predictions in the standard cosmological model, the best current model of the universe.
Monday, May 17, 2021

Applications Now Open for McWilliams Center Seed Funding Grants

Seed funding grants have been established to support McWilliams Center faculty members, postdocs, graduate students, and research staff to conduct preliminary analyses, demonstrate proof of concept, collect preliminary data, and establish the potential for high impact of the proposed idea for future proposal submissions.
Wednesday, May 05, 2021

Machine Learning Accelerates Cosmological Simulations

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a way to create a complex simulated universe in less than a day. The technique, published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brings together machine learning, high-performance computing and astrophysics and will help to usher in a new era of high-resolution cosmology simulations.
Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Carl Rodriguez Receives Kaufman Foundation New Investigator Award

Assistant Professor of Physics Carl Rodriguez has received a New Investigator Award from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation. The two-year, $150,000 grant will support his research into understanding the origins of binary black holes and the gravitational waves they produce.
Wednesday, November 18, 2020

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope to Uncover Echoes of the Universe’s Creation

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will detect vestiges of sound waves that once rippled through the primordial cosmic sea. According to new simulations led by alumnus Siddharth Satpathy, Roman’s observations could extend these measurements into an unprobed epoch between the universe’s infancy and the present day. Studying the echoes from this era will help us trace the evolution of the universe and solve pressing cosmic conundrums.
Thursday, October 15, 2020

Simulations Show Webb Telescope Can Reveal Distant Galaxies Hidden in Quasars’ Glare

New research suggests that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2021, will be able to reveal the host galaxies of some distant quasars despite their small sizes and obscuring dust. The study made use of a powerful computer simulation developed by a team of Carnegie Mellon University researchers led by Professor of Physics Tiziana Di Matteo, director of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology.
Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Carnegie Mellon Named NSF Planning Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Physics

Carnegie Mellon University has received a $500,000 planning grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to work toward creating a National Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Physics. The grant creates 5 full institutes and 10 planning institutes that will focus on advancing foundational artificial intelligence (AI) research, accelerating innovation in scientific fields using AI, building the next generation of talent and bringing together scientists from a wide range of fields for interdisciplinary collaboration. The grants represent the NSF’s most significant investment in AI research and workforce development to-date.
Friday, May 15, 2020

Announcing the McWilliams/PSC Seed Grant 2020 Recipients

The McWilliams Center for Cosmology and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) are excited to announce the recipients of a new seed grant program to support faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff who want to explore a new area of research or jumpstart their research activity.
Wednesday, February 26, 2020

McWilliams Center Announces New Seed Funding Grants

New seed funding grants have been established to support McWilliams Center faculty members, postdocs, graduate students, and research staff to conduct preliminary analyses, demonstrate proof of concept, collect preliminary data, and establish the potential for high impact of the proposed idea for future proposal submissions.
Tuesday, November 26, 2019

Gilman Elected 2019 AAAS Fellow

Physics Professor Fred Gilman has been elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) 2019 class of fellows. Gilman was recognized for his work elucidating the fundamental nature of CP violation and his sustained and successful leadership in the particle physics and cosmology communities.
Monday, November 25, 2019

Tiziana Di Matteo Awarded NASA Grant to Study Black Holes and Gravitational Waves

Professor of Physics Tiziana Di Matteo has been awarded a grant from the Astrophysics Theory Program at NASA to pursue her research on multi-messenger astrophysics with regards to massive black hole binaries.
Tuesday, November 12, 2019

A Runaway Star Ejected from the Galactic Heart of Darkness

Astronomers, including CMU Physics Professor Sergey Koposov, have spotted an ultrafast star, traveling at a blistering six million km/h, that was ejected by the supermassive black hole at the heart at the Milky Way five million years ago.
Monday, July 22, 2019

Scientists Weigh the Balance of Matter in Galaxy Clusters

A method of weighing the quantities of matter in galaxy clusters — the largest objects in our universe — has shown a balance between the amounts of hot gas, stars and other materials.
Friday, July 19, 2019

Mirror, Mirror on the Mountain

A unique astronomical mirror reached its new home in the Andes Mountains of Northern Chile. This incredible mirror will enable the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) to catalog an estimated ~40 billion celestial objects—more objects than there are humans on earth.
Monday, June 24, 2019

Carnegie Mellon Physicist Rachel Mandelbaum Named 2019 Simons Investigator

Carnegie Mellon University physicist Rachel Mandelbaum has been named a 2019 Simons Investigator by the Simons Foundation.
Thursday, April 11, 2019

Mandelbaum Elected Spokesperson for LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration

Carnegie Mellon University Associate Professor of Physics Rachel Mandelbaum has been elected as the spokesperson for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope’s (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC). Mandelbaum will serve as spokesperson-elect until her two-year term begins on July 1.
Friday, March 15, 2019

LSST Primary/Tertiary Mirror Leave Tuscon, Bound for Chile

The 8.4-meter Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has begun its journey from Tucson to north-central Chile, where it will be integrated with the telescope on Cerro Pachón.
Tuesday, January 08, 2019

Dark Energy Survey Completes Six-Year Mission

After scanning in depth about a quarter of the southern skies for six years and cataloging hundreds of millions of distant galaxies, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) will finish taking data tomorrow, on Jan. 9.
Thursday, January 03, 2019

Dark Matter on the Move

Scientists have found evidence that dark matter can be heated up and moved around, as a result of star formation in galaxies. The findings provide the first observational evidence for the effect known as ‘dark matter heating,’ and give new clues as to what makes up dark matter. The research is published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey Maps Dark Matter in the Universe

An international group of researchers, including Carnegie Mellon University’s Rachel Mandelbaum, has released the deepest wide field map of the three-dimensional distribution of matter in the universe ever made and increased the precision of constraints for dark energy with the Hyper Suprime-Cam survey (HSC).
Wednesday, July 04, 2018

The Gaia Sausage: The Collision That Changed the Milky Way

Between 8 billion and 10 billion years ago, a dwarf galaxy crashed into our own Milky Way. The dwarf did not survive, but its final act redefined the shape of the Milky Way. Our galaxy has never been the same.
Sunday, October 15, 2017

Scientists Spot Explosive Counterpart of LIGO/Virgo’s Latest Gravitational Waves

Today, a team of scientists using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), the primary observing tool of the Dark Energy Survey, was among the first to observe the fiery aftermath of a recently detected burst of gravitational waves, recording images of the first confirmed explosion from two colliding neutron stars ever seen by astronomers. Their data was bolstered by data captured at other observatories around the world.
Friday, October 13, 2017

Stanford’s Dan Akerib to Give CMU’s Bennett-McWilliams Lecture

Do WIMPs rule in the hunt for dark matter? Learn more about dark matter and the current state of the search for dark matter particles when Stanford physicist Dan Akerib gives Carnegie Mellon University’s Bennett-McWilliams Lecture in Cosmology Thursday, Oct. 26, at 4:30 p.m. in the Gates-Hillman Center’s Rashid Auditorium.
Monday, November 14, 2016

Carnegie Mellon Hosts Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Hack Week

While the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is being built in Chile, researchers from around the world are working hard to develop the research infrastructure that they will need to interpret the vast amounts of data that the telescope will create as it surveys the sky over the course of 10 years.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Assembly Bias In Galaxy Clustering

Rachel Mandelbaum, has shown that the relationship between galaxy clusters and their surrounding dark matter halo is more complex than previously thought. The researchers’ findings, published in Physical Review Letters, are the first to use observational data to show that, in addition to mass, a galaxy cluster’s formation history plays a role in how it interacts with its environment.
Monday, September 21, 2015

Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Receives Next Step of Approval from DOE

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has reached its next major milestone. The project has received Critical Decision-2 approval from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This approval authorizes the project’s scientific scope, schedule and funding profile, ensuring that the project will be supported into the next decade.
Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Milky Way-Like Galaxies May Have Existed in the Early Universe

A new, large-scale computer simulation has shown for the first time that large disk galaxies, much like our own Milky Way, may have existed in the early days of the universe.
Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Unexpected Gamma-Ray Emission From Dwarf Galaxy May Point to New Understanding of Dark Matter

A newly discovered dwarf galaxy orbiting our own Milky Way has offered up a surprise — it appears to be radiating gamma rays, according to an analysis by physicists at Carnegie Mellon, Brown and Cambridge universities. The exact source of this high-energy light is uncertain at this point, but it just might be a signal of dark matter lurking at the galaxy’s center.
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March 2021: Welcome Benjamin Moews, Our New Postdoc!

Benjamin has a master's degree in artificial intelligence and Ph.D. in astrophysics from university of Edinburgh, and he works at the intersection of cosmology, machine learning and statistics. He is interested in the development and application of inference methods to challenges in modern cosmology in general, with a particular focus on problems in cosmological parameter estimation, cosmic voids, weak lensing, and galaxy evolution. In his free time, he can be found in the gym, dug into books or tinkering with watches, at concerts and music festivals, playing instruments, and trying to acclimate himself to American instead of British English. More information about Ben can be found at his webpage, https://benmoews.com. He will be joining us in fall 2021.

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March 2021: Welcome Harry Desmond, Our New Postdoc!

Harry has a master's degree in astrophysics and theoretical physics from University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford. He studies the structure and dynamics of galaxies in order to devise novel tests of fundamental physics, and also to learn about the physical processes underlying galaxy formation. Harry has done extensive work on developing and applying astrophysical tests of gravity as well as dark matter physics. He also uses semi-empirical models and hydrodynamical simulations to study the dynamical scaling relations in galaxies and is also interested in the methodology of statistical inference, concordance problems like the Hubble tension and using the stellar structure as a probe of basic physics. Harry is also an excellent teacher and has won Paul H. Kirkpatrick award for excellence in teaching from Stanford University. More information about Harry’s research and outreach activities can be found at his webpage, https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/contacts/people/desmond. He will be joining us in fall 2021.