For her landmark work in the development and application of shock physics techniques to explain the origin and evolution of planetary systems, Sarah Stewart has been selected as an American Physical Society Fellow, a prestigious honor that no more than half of one percent of the society’s membership (excluding student members) are nominated for each year.
When researchers glimpsed the first images and data from the James Webb Space Telescope, humanity’s largest and most powerful space telescope, they noticed something peculiar. A large number of bright galaxies deep in the universe formed during a period called “Cosmic Dawn,” when the first stars and galaxies formed within 500 million years after the Big Bang. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters shows that a theoretical model produced roughly five years ago predicted these very observations and credits them to bursty star formation.
A mathematician working in the life sciences and an astrophysicist studying dark matter from the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis are among the recent cohort awarded Chancellor’s Fellowships for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. The fellowships recognize exceptional contributions in supporting, tutoring, mentoring and advising underrepresented students and/or students from underserved communities. In letters to the recipients, Chancellor May cited their “commitment to reducing opportunity gaps.”
Sarah Stewart, professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Davis, will discuss planetary collisions and the discovery of a new type of astronomical object at a public lecture supported by the Winston Ko Professorship in Science Leadership. Stewart’s presentation will be “A New Creation Story for the Earth and Moon.”
A team of UC Davis students has placed first overall in the First Nations Launch competition sponsored by NASA and the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium.
Two rising stars in the sciences have received prestigious CAREER awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program recognizes junior faculty who conduct outstanding research, are excellent educators and include education or community outreach in their work.
Some of the Milky Way’s oldest stars have been spotted in a surprising place — the disk that is our galaxy’s youngest region. Supercomputer simulations of their orbits suggest these metal-poor stars came from a smaller galaxy that slammed into the Milky Way more than 7 billion years ago.
Astronomers are getting a look at the dusty part of the distant universe with a huge field of telescopes in the high, dry Atacama desert of Chile. New results are telling us about the structure of the distant universe and yielding surprises about the evolution of galaxies.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, collects infrared light, so astronomers can learn more about distant galaxies as well as picking up objects that they could not see at all in the visible or ultraviolet spectrum.
According to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, gravity is curvature in the fabric of spacetime. Shockwaves can distort spacetime, causing singularities where the laws of physics appear to break down.
Now two mathematicians at UC Davis have come up with equations that remove these singularities. In doing so, they also extend a theorem called Uhlenbeck Compactness to the setting of General Relativity.
University of California, Davis, will be part of a new National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center focusing on understanding the physics and astrophysical implications of matter under pressures so high that the structure of individual atoms is disrupted.
