UC Irvine’s Center for Cosmology faculty Prof. James Weatherall, joint with the Western University of Ontario Prof. Christopher Smeenk have been awarded at $1.37 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation for their project studying the philosophical underpinnings of physical cosmology. It was announced on May 7.

Here is how the principal investigators describe their project:

Physical cosmology has enjoyed decades of progress, leading to a new understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. But this success comes with new puzzles. Cosmologists seek to understand events that are far removed from us. Moreover, in many cases they study historical episodes that are apparently unique—such as the origin of the universe—and which cannot be studied experimentally. To overcome these challenges, cosmologists have often revisited basic questions concerning what constitutes an acceptable scientific theory, what sorts of explanatory demands a theory of cosmology can meet, and how to understand confirmation in this context. Their answers to these —essentially philosophical—questions have shaped the character of cosmological theory.

The principal goal of this project is to articulate and scrutinize the philosophical commitments behind cosmology’s Standard Model. With the support of a planning grant, we have conducted a landscape review of the field to identify the most significant open questions. One part of the project will present what we take to be the “philosophy of science” underlying cosmological practice, reflecting on and extending the earlier work we have reviewed. The second part of the project will dive more deeply into two pressing conceptual issues, which we identified in workshops with cosmologists supported by the planning grant: (1) the epistemological significance of the crucial role now played by simulations in linking cosmological theory with observations; and (2) the status of the large-scale structure of the universe in light of suggestions from quantum gravity that characteristic features of general relativity, such as singularities, may not persist into future theories.

In addition to this research component, the project includes outreach and capacity-building activities. It will also provide substantial training opportunities at the pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and established researcher levels. 

You can learn more about the project here.

via The Daily Nous.

On 31 January 2018, in Minor Planet Circular 108696, the International Astronomical Union announced that asteroid 9271, discovered as 1978 VT₈ on 7 November that year by E. F. Helin and S. J. Bus at Palomar Observatory, will henceforth be known as Trimble. The MPC citation reads, “Virginia Louise Trimble (b. 1943) is a highly perceptive commentator on the state of astronomy, regarded as a creative and insightful spokesperson for astronomy. Beyond her own special interests in stellar structure and evolution, she has improved the health of the profession through her application of historical citation studies.”

Congratulations to Prof. Trimble!

Work by Cosmology Center Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Marcel Pawlowski and collaborators has shown that the orderly motion of satellite galaxies around Centaurus A, Andromeda as well as the Milky Way are not what is expected in structure formation simulations, and may have implications for dark matter.

The study made it to the cover of Science Magazine today and was covered in the LA Times, Forbes, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine and Sky & Telescope.

The paper is available on the arXiv.

It has been a great year at the Center for Cosmology at UC Irvine. The former Director, Prof. James Bullock, has ascended to be the Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the summer of 2017, and a new Director, Prof. Kevork Abazajian, took up directorship. Center for Cosmology faculty and students have had significant impact.

Here are some highlights from this year

UC Irvine astronomers make a hundred million discoveries — black holes

Recent UCI Physics & Astronomy Ph.D. recipient Dr. Oliver Elberthad 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.”

UC Irvine and UC Riverside Team Up to Show Strong Evidence for Dark Matter Self-Interactions

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.

2018 Reines Lecture

Starting in the 1960’s, efforts were made to detect a new type of radiation in the Universe, gravitational waves. The first detection of them was announced in 2016, from colliding black holes, using techniques developed by Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish. Prof. Kip Thorne will be giving the 2018 Reines Lecture on this discovery, for which he shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Exploring the Universe with Gravitational Waves: From the Big Bang to Black Holes

Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Irvine Barclay Theatre
7:30 – 8:30 PM
This talk is free and open to the public, but you must register here.

UC Irvine cosmologist Prof. James Bullock was appointed chair of the James Webb Space Telescopeusers committee. The group, which includes 10 to 14 American, European and Canadian scientists, was established to ensure that the observatory is operated in such a way as to maximize its scientific performance. The JWST, successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch in spring 2019

The Center 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 studentsthat 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.

TV Show “Big Bang Theory” displayed 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.

A hilarious and helpful guide to the biggest mysteries in the Universe. PHD Comics creator Jorge Cham and UC Irvine particle physicist Prof. Daniel Whiteson team up to explain everything we don’t know about the Universe, from Cosmic Rays and Dark Matter to time travel and the Big Bang.