News/Events

From the depths of space, astronomers have detected a “heartbeat.”  

The Southeastern Universities Research Association honored Dr. Maura McLaughlin, Director of the Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology with the SURA Distinguished Scientist Award. 

Caitlin Witt, has been awarded the prestigious CIERA-Adler Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chicago, Illinois.

Astronomers have been surprised by the closest source of the mysterious flashes in the sky known as fast radio bursts. Precision measurements with radio telescopes reveal that the bursts are made among old stars, and in a way that no one was expecting. The source of the flashes, in nearby spiral galaxy M 81, is the closest of its kind to Earth.

Honored for their innovative work in the field of fast radio bursts utilizing the CHIME radio telescope, the international CHIME/FRB team will receive the 2022 Berkeley prize for its dramatic progress on fast radio bursts (FRBs).  

An international team of astronomers, including members of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), has announced the results of a comprehensive search for ripples in the fabric of space-time – known as gravitational waves. The team searched for low-frequency gravitational waves, which can originate from supermassive black hole binaries residing in galaxies or from events occurring soon after the formation of the universe in the Big Bang. Detecting these low-frequency signals will open a brand-new window in the gravitational wave spectrum and help scientists enhance their understanding of the evolution of galaxies, their central black holes, and the early universe.

Christine Ye, a high school senior at Eastlake High School and a student in the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, was recently named one of the top 300 scholars in the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search competition.

Haley Wahl, a fifth year PhD student in Physics and Astronomy at WVU, has been awarded the AAS (American Astronomical Society) Media Fellowship.