This week, filmmaker Debra Kellner brought us the first in a series of short films about the construction of the Simons Observatory. It includes some beautiful drone footage of ACT, POLARBEAR, and the site at which SO will soon be built. There was some debate about whether or not a drone could fly above 17,000 … Continue reading The Eternal Sky: A short film about the Simons Observatory

As it turns out, non-expert citizen scientists can match or beat out ATLAS algorithms in identifying features in images of LHC collisions. The ability of the general public to identify long-lived particles and other unusual features in images of LHC collisions recorded by the ATLAS experiment was studied using data from the Higgs Hunters project. The … Continue reading Are you smarter than an ATLAS algorithm?

Neutrinos, like the beloved Whos in Dr. Seuss’ “Horton Hears a Who!,” are light and elusive, yet have a large impact on the universe we live in. While neutrinos only interact with matter through the weak nuclear force and gravity, they played a critical role in the formation of the early universe. Neutrino physics is … Continue reading Horton Hears a Sterile Neutrino?

Like X-rays shining through your body can inform you about your health, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) shining through galaxy clusters can tell us about the universe we live in. When light from the CMB is distorted by the high energy electrons present in galaxy clusters, it’s called the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. A new 4.1σ measurement … Continue reading The CMB sheds light on galaxy clusters: Observing the kSZ signal with ACT and BOSS

After the chirp heard ‘round the world, the search is on for coincident astrophysical particle events to provide insight into the source and nature of the era-defining gravitational wave events detected by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration in late 2015. By combining information from gravitational wave (GW) events with the detection of astrophysical neutrinos and electromagnetic … Continue reading The dawn of multi-messenger astronomy: using KamLAND to study gravitational wave events GW150914 and GW151226