Astronomy

Astronomers have found a clever new way to slice and dice the flickering light from a distant star in a way that reveals the strength of gravity on its surface. Read More

Fisk and Vanderbilt's Bridge Program mentors talented minority students pursuing advanced science degrees. Keivan Stassun, professor of astronomy and director of the Fisk-Vanderbilt Masters-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program, is quoted. Read More

The reason dark matter, which makes up 85 percent of all the matter in the universe, is invisible could be because it possesses a rare, donut-shaped type of electromagnetism instead of the more exotic forces that have been proposed, according to an analysis of a pair of Vanderbilt theoretical physicists. Read More

A scientific team led by University of Louisville doctoral student Karen Collins has discovered a hot Saturn-like planet in another solar system 700 light years away. The discovery was made using inexpensive ground-based telescopes, including one specially designed to detect exoplanets and jointly operated by astronomers at Ohio State University and Vanderbilt University. Read More

A team of researchers, headed by Vanderbilt astronomer C. Robert O’Dell, has combined images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope with images from ground-based telescopes to reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of the iconic nebula with unprecedented precision. In the process, they determined that it is considerably different than previously thought. Read More

A team of Vanderbilt astronomers will play a key role in the planet-seeking space telescope that NASA has just approved and scheduled for launch in 2017. Read More

This year the Fisk–Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge program, directed by Keivan Stassun, professor of astronomy, will become the nation’s No. 1 producer of minority Ph.D. recipients in physics, astronomy and materials science. Read More

A Vanderbilt engineering graduate student has created a small-scale, efficient way to produce high-energy density plasma--the state of matter found in the center of stars and gas giants like Jupiter--with a tabletop device. Read More

Two astronomers from Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, sharing a car after a snowstorm canceled their flights home from a conference, put together everything they had learned at the conference during that snowy drive and worked out that a collision between two black holes could explain most of what is known of a violent episode in the Milky Way's past. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy and physics, wraps up this three-part podcast series with an interview about her specialty, supermassive black holes. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy, continues her discussion of black holes in the second part of this interview for Red Orbit. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy, talks about what sets black holes apart from other objects in the universe and explains how the laws of space, time and gravity bend and even break down to create the most destructive force in the cosmos. Read More

Not long after he arrived at Vanderbilt nine years ago, Keivan Stassun, professor of astronomy, began building on a newly forged alliance with Fisk University, a historically black college just two miles from the Vanderbilt campus, in an effort to increase the number of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities earning Ph.D. degrees in science. Read More

This Week on VUCast, Vanderbilt’s online newscast: Star Power? Why ignorance is bliss when it comes to a star’s selling power. Football Fan Frenzy! We’re anchoring down with the Dores! VUCast takes you to the field Space Odyssey– How you can go on a… Read More

An electrical engineer who is attempting to make wireless communications more reliable, an astronomer who studies the evolution of the cosmos by creating large numbers of virtual universes and a geologist who is studying the origins of super-eruptions have received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development awards. Read More

The latest observations of a newly born star have found that it has a pair of spots on its surface that are heated to more than one million degrees. The presence of these spots confirms a theory for how stellar infants grow advanced by Professor of Astronomy David Weintraub and a colleague. Read More

A small telescope with a lens no more powerful than a high-end digital camera has discovered the existence of two very unusual exoplanets. Read More

The Dyer Observatory is calling all science sleuths to help identify an unknown object spotted on June 5. Read More

Vanderbilt is on track this year to become the number one producer of minority Ph.D. recipients in physics, astronomy and materials science, an area where minorities are grossly underrepresented. Watch the emotional journey of the latest doctoral graduates from the Fisk-Vanderbilt-Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program. [vucastblurb]… Read More

Astronomers have identified nearly 700 rogue stars that appear to have been ejected from the Milky Way galaxy. Read More