Astronomers from Texas to Argentina recently celebrated a critical milestone in their nearly decade-long project to search for and measure the electromagnetic evidence of gravitational waves throughout the cosmos — “first light” for the Transient Optical Robotic Observatory of the South (TOROS) telescope in northwestern Argentina. On April 10, a team of engineers and astronomers […]
Texas A&M University and its partners in the Giant Magellan Telescope Corporation announced today (Mar. 5) that fabrication has begun for the sixth of seven mirrors which will form the heart of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) — mirrors that in combination will allow astronomers to see farther into the universe with more detail than […]
A new data-driven study from Texas A&M University casts serious doubt on the long-held belief that male students perform better than female students in science — specifically, physics. A team of researchers in the Department of Physics and Astronomy analyzed both the midterm exam scores and final grades of more than 10,000 Texas A&M students […]
Fourteen research projects — including two led by faculty from the Texas A&M University College of Science — have been chosen for 2020-2021 funding under The Texas A&M University System National Laboratories Office Collaborative Research Program aimed at increasing engagement between Texas A&M System and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) researchers. Bhaskar Dutta (Credit: Ryan […]
Three years into its quest to reveal the nature of dark energy, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) led by The University of Texas at Austin and involving Texas A&M University is on track to complete the largest map of the cosmos ever — a three-dimensional map of 2.5 million galaxies that will help astronomers […]
One of the biggest challenges organizations face among the many potential hazards they encounter when sending humans and aerospace systems traveling through the endless reaches of the cosmos is the harsh radiation environment. All it takes is a single rogue particle to wreak havoc on the electronic components of a spacecraft with potentially catastrophic results. […]
Earlier this month, crews at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory celebrated a major milestone in astronomy — the first 3,200-megapixel digital photographs taken with the world’s largest digital camera for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The collection of images, which are the largest ever captured in a […]
The GMTO Corporation, the organization managing the development of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) on behalf of its US and international founders including Texas A&M University, has received a $17.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to accelerate prototyping and testing of some of the most powerful optical and infrared technologies ever engineered […]
Three Texas A&M University projects are among 64 university research awards announced earlier this summer by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of a $132 million high energy physics-focused funding package aimed at advancing knowledge of how the universe works at its most fundamental levels. Texas A&M physicist Rupak Mahapatra received funding for […]
Dr. Darren L. DePoy, professor of physics and astronomy at Texas A&M University, has been named associate dean for research in the Texas A&M College of Science, effective September 1, 2020, announced Dean Valen E. Johnson. A member of the Texas A&M Department of Physics and Astronomy since 2008, DePoy is the inaugural holder of […]
Since the early 1980s, Texas A&M University physicist and quantum cowboy Marlan O. Scully has hosted an annual summer school on quantum physics at his ranch in Casper, Wyoming. Like so many other traditional events, however, this year’s session set to begin next week has been moved online due to the novel coronavirus pandemic — […]
WHAT DID THE 2010 EARLY CAREER AWARD ALLOW YOU TO DO? Dark matter makes up most of the mass of the universe. It is believed to be made up of a yet-to-be-discovered stable, heavy particle that interacts very weakly with ordinary matter. There is an intense search worldwide to directly detect this particle using a […]
Dr. Grigory Rogachev Carbon, known universally as the basic building block of life, is generally thought by scientists to have formed inside the cores of stars. Now, an experimental apparatus designed by scientists at Texas A&M University is playing a major, first-of-its-kind role in a collaboration to test whether or not the element could have […]
Texas A&M University physicist Rupak Mahapatra has been appointed as director of research engagement for The Texas A&M University System National Laboratories Office (NLO). Shortly after the Texas A&M System became part of the team tasked with managing and operating Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 2018, Texas A&M System Chancellor John Sharp established the […]
On any given day, particularly during the peak hours of another busy fall semester, the 35,000-square-foot Shell Engineering Foundations Laboratory is a blur of activity, with machines humming and whirring over the din of student chatter as their mechanical arms chart patterns if not the career courses for thousands of future Aggie engineers and scientists. […]
GMTO Corporation, the organization managing the development of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) on behalf of its U.S. and international founders including Texas A&M University, has signed a contract with MT Mechatronics and Ingersoll Machine Tools to design, build and install the telescope’s precision steel structure. Latest design of the Giant Magellan Telescope enclosure, telescope […]
It’s known as the thinnest material on Earth and one you can find in something as everyday as a pencil: graphene. In 2010, Manchester researchers Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov won a Nobel Prize in Physics with it just six years after they discovered how to isolate a single atomic layer of it quite unceremoniously – […]
Effective energy landscape for circular skyrmion breathing modes, Eq. (27), with B=0.45, highlighting the distinct basin, bowl and horn energy partitioned by the constant saddle energy curve (shown in white). Inset: a cut through η=0 and η=π. (Photo credit: journals.aps.org) In a constant push for the smaller and faster computer memory devices, Dr. Artem G. […]
Dr. Ralf Rapp Dr. Ralf Rapp discusses the origin of 98% of the visible mass in the universe in a recent article in Nature Physics. This mass was generated when a hot plasma of quarks and gluons condensed into hadrons in the early Universe. Calculations by Dr. Rapp and collaborators found that the mass of […]
An international team of astronomers that includes Texas A&M University’s Benjamin Boizelle and Jonelle Walsh has obtained the clearest view to date of cold gas rotation around a supermassive black hole. Using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) — a huge, highly sophisticated radio telescope array situated at an altitude of […]