Related papers: A New Lecture-Tutorial for Teaching Interferometry…
Over the past two decades, I have been actively involved in teaching astronomy and astrophysics to Chicago Public School (CPS) students and their teachers, in collaboration with various groups as well as by myself. Valuable resources that…
In this work we present an observational technique and a detailed analysis of the stellar interferograms produced by three bright stars: Betelgeuse, Rigel and Sirius. It is shown that the atmospheric turbulence is responsible for the…
Pupil-remapping is a new high-dynamic range imaging technique that has recently demonstrated feasibility on sky. The current prototypes present however deceiving limiting magnitude, restricting the current use to the brightest stars in the…
Over the past decade, neutrino astronomy has emerged as a new window into the extreme and hidden universe. Current-generation experiments have detected high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin and identified the first sources, opening…
The past few years have seen several breakthroughs in particle astrophysics and cosmology. In several cases, new observations can only be explained with the introduction of new fundamental physics. In this talk I summarize some of these…
Both the basic educational contents for students and study programs for science teachers include several topics in physics and astronomy, from the simplest ones to others as advanced as nuclear fusion to explain stellar evolution and…
The LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detectors have just completed their first science run, following many years of planning, research, and development. LIGO is a member of what will be a worldwide network of…
Astrophotonics is a burgeoning field that lies at the interface of photonics and modern astronomical instrumentation. Here we provide a pedagogical review of basic photonic functions that enable modern instruments, and give an overview of…
Undergraduate physics and astronomy students are expected to engage with scientific literature as they begin their research careers, but reading comprehension skills are rarely explicitly taught in major courses. We seek to determine the…
Some 400 years after Galileo, modern telescopes have enabled humanity to "see" what the natural eye cannot. Astronomical images today contain information about incredibly large objects located across vast distances and reveal information…
Optical long-baseline interferometry is a unique and powerful technique for astronomical research. Since 2004, optical interferometers have produced an increasing number of scientific papers covering various fields of astrophysics. As…
Previous studies conclusively show that pencil-and-paper lecture-tutorials (LTs) are incredibly effective at increasing student engagement and learning gains on a variety of topics when compared to traditional lecture. LTs in astronomy are…
With the detection of Gravitational waves just about an year ago Einstein`s general theory of relativity- a space-time theory of gravity, got established on a firmer footing than any other theory in physics. Gravitational waves are just…
We review the tantalising prospect that the first evidence for the dark energy driving the observed acceleration of the Universe on giga-parsec scales may be found through metre scale laboratory based atom interferometry experiments. To do…
Black holes have the peculiar and intriguing property of having an event horizon, a one-way membrane causally separating their internal region from the rest of the Universe. Today astrophysical observations provide some evidence for the…
Undergraduate animation students at the Maryland Institute College of Art teamed up with scientists from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to produce a set of animations on several astronomy topics. We describe the process and discuss the…
21 cm cosmology, the statistical observation of the high redshift universe using the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen, has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of cosmology and the astrophysical processes that underlie…
Interferometry has brought many new constraints in optical astronomy in the recent years. A major leap in this field is the opening of large interferometric facilities like the Very Large Telescope Interferometer and the Keck Interferometer…
The Event Horizon Telescope Consortium is on the verge to provide the first telescopic image of massive black holes SgrA* and M87* surrounded by accretion disks, at a resolution scale comparable to the size of their event horizons. Well…
Horizon-scale imaging with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has provided transformative insights into supermassive black holes but its resolution and scope are limited by ground-based constraints such as the size of the Earth, its…