News
Kelly, Nagam, and Border Accepted to Roman Cycle 1
Posted
Kelly, Nagam, and Border Accepted to Roman Space Telescope Cycle 1 Program
Zooniverse Approaching 1 Billion Classification Milestone
Posted
Professor Lucy Fortson of the School of Physics and Astronomy is one of the founding members of the Zooniverse citizen science collaboration platform. Zooniverse connects over 3 million volunteers with research projects and provides an online platform for citizen scientists to accelerate research across the sciences by contributing classifications. The platform, which is the largest and most popular of its kind, is expected to reach the one billion classification mark by June 30, 2026.
Sasli, Coughlin, and Bolin Selected for Roman Telescope Program
Posted
Sasli, Coughlin, and Bolin Selected for Roman Space Telescope Cycle 1 Program
Solar astrophysics students building instrument that will hitch a ride on NASA balloon
Posted
Students in the School of Physics and astronomy, under the supervision of Professor Lindsay Glesener, are building a solar x-ray spectrometer that is planned to fly on a NASA high-altitude balloon from Antarctica in late 2026 or early 2027.
Cushman and Liu groups help SuperCDMS to major milestone
Posted
School of Physics and Astronomy faculty members Priscilla Cushman and Yan Liu are part of a collaboration that successfully cooled the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) experiment to base temperature - the temperature required for the superconducting detectors to become operational. This temperature is hundreds of times colder than outer space.
Miller and Skinner receive prestigious NASA Future Investigator Fellowships
Posted
School of Physics and Astronomy graduate students John Miller Jr and Evan Skinner received highly competitive NASA Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) Fellowships. Their research proposals were selected from almost 1500 in the field of Space Science and Technology with a selection rate <10%. The funding amount is $150,000 each for three years.
Coughlin part of team that developed alert broker “Babamul” to help parse data from the LSST
Posted
Coughlin is part of a collaboration with Caltech to build a broker called Babamul, which can receive alerts from telescope surveys like Rubin Observatory and the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) to zoom in on those phenomena while they are still happening.
Coughlin part of team that wins Scialog Award in early LSST research
Posted
This Scialog–short for science + dialog– is a “three-year initiative that aims to advance the foundational science needed to realize the full potential of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).”
UMN and MIT launch first real-time machine learning search for colliding black holes
Posted
A joint effort between the University of Minnesota and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has achieved the first end-to-end, real-time search for binary black hole (BBH) mergers based entirely on machine learning.