“Big Bang Theory” – a popular TV sitcom – will display notes from two research papers written by Jonathan Feng, Cosmology Center Faculty and UCI professor of physics & astronomy, with UCI post-doctoral scholars, Iftah Galon, Felix Kling, and Sebastian Trojanowski. On the board, the team is pitching a new detector to be placed at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. The relatively small and inexpensive instrument called FASER has been shown to have remarkable prospects for discovering certain kinds of new particles, according to Feng, who hopes it will be used to provide evidence for a new force to help the science world determine the nature of dark matter. “’The Big Bang Theory’ is one of the most popular shows on television, averaging about 10 million viewers per week,” Feng said. “What is less known is that, among experts, it’s famous for getting the science right and being on top of the latest trends, so we thought it was great when they decided to use excerpts from our papers.”

This appearance was covered by the Daily Pilot – LA Times, and the OC Register.

The original paper is available on the arXiv.

A UC Irvine Center for Cosmology and UC Riverside collaboration showed strong evidence from the wide diversity of rotation curves of galaxies points to dark matter having self interactions. The results were published in the world’s premier physics letter journal, Physical Review Letters, covered in American Physical Society’s Synopsis, and received broad press coverage including in Physics World. Authors of the paper were Ayuki Kamada, Manoj Kaplinghat, Andrew B. Pace, and Hai-Bo Yu.

Credit: ESA/Hubble/NASA

The Department of Physics & Astronomy and the Center for Cosmology hosted a Great American Eclipse viewing party on August 21, 2017, for the eclipse that traveled coast-to-coast across America. The event was estimated to draw 1,100 visitors from across Irvine and Orange County, and was the largest public event hosted by the Department of Physics & Astronomy and School of Physical Sciences since a celebration of the 1995 Nobel Prizes to Frederick Reines and Sherwood Rowland. Credit goes to the graduate students that led the organization of the event: Katy Rodriguez Wimberly and Arianna Brown.

The event was covered by the OC Register, KTLA Channel 5, NBC News, and is on Storify.

UC Irvine astronomers make a hundred million discoveries — black holes

Recent UCI Physics & Astronomy Ph.D. recipient Dr. Oliver Elbert had his work, available on the arXiv, with Prof. James Bullock and Prof. Manoj Kaplinghat covered in Forbes, Phys.Org, The Universe Today, and the OC Register:

“Astronomers from UC Irvine have concluded that as many as 100 million black holes exist in our galaxy – a tally far more than previously believed and shocking even to the three researchers… The trio’s discovery grows out of the 2015 detection of evidence showing that two black holes, each the size of 30 suns, collided to form a single one some 1.3 billion years ago. In response to that groundbreaking news — which confirmed a key part of Einstein’s theory of relativity —  the three UCI astronomers launched their study to determine how many black holes there are in the Milky Way.”