The second year to be fully in person, students from all over the country are at The University of New Mexico for 10 weeks as part of the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program in the Physics and Astronomy.
Astrophysical sciences and technology Ph.D. student Olivia Young earned a competitive fellowship from the National Science Foundation to develop machine learning algorithms that will help scientists use radio telescopes to study transient objects such as pulsars and fast radio bursts.
May 25, 2021
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded The University of New Mexico a three-year, $500,000 grant to develop software that utilizes Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to capture and process data from astronomical telescopes.
GPUs render the beautiful graphic displays in games found on modern computers, including cell phones and tablets. The software, known as Bifrost, provides a collection of software building blocks that can be put together to process streams of data in a highly parallel fashion. For example, Bifrost is currently in use at the Long Wavelength Array (LWA). The LWA is a radio telescope for exploration of a broad scientific portfolio ranging from the study of Cosmic Dawn, when the stars and galaxies lit up the universe, to understanding the properties of the Earth’s ionosphere.
“You’ve heard of electric cars and e-books, but now we are talking about electric dark matter,” said Julian Munoz of Harvard University. “However, this electric charge is on the very smallest of scales.”
“We are constraining the possibility that dark matter particles carry a tiny electrical charge – equal to one millionth that of an electron – through measurable signals from the cosmic dawn,” says Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) about the nature of ne of the enduring mysteries of the Universe. “Such tiny charges are impossible to observe even with the largest particle accelerators.”
Astronomers have proposed a new model for the invisible material that makes up most of the matter in the Universe. They have studied whether a fraction of dark matter particles may have a tiny electrical charge.