Kavli Affiliate: Sarah N. T. Heine | Summary:Micro-X is a NASA-funded, sounding rocket-borne X-ray imaging spectrometer that will allow high precision measurements of velocity structure, ionization state and elemental composition of extended astrophysical systems. One of the biggest challenges in payload design is to maintain the temperature of the detectors during launch. There are several […]
Kavli Affiliate: John Belcher | Summary:Massive Open Online Courses are an exciting new avenue for instruction and research, yet they are full of unknowns. In the Spring of 2013, MITx released its first introductory physics MOOC through the edX platform, generating a total enrollment of 43,000 students from around the world. We describe the population […]
Kavli Affiliate: Rebecca Masterson | Summary:The OSIRIS-REx Mission was selected under the NASA New Frontiers program and is scheduled for launch in September of 2016 for a rendezvous with, and collection of a sample from the surface of asteroid Bennu in 2019. 101955 Bennu (previously 1999 RQ36) is an Apollo (near-Earth) asteroid originally discovered by […]
Kavli Affiliate: Claude Canizares | Summary:We present observations of the SS 433 jets using the Chandra High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer with contemporaneous optical and VLBA observations. The X-ray and optical emission line regions are found to be related but not coincident as the optical line emission persists for days while the X-ray emission lines […]
Kavli Affiliate: Sarah N. T. Heine | Summary:We present the analysis of 21 bright X-ray knots in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant from observations spanning 10 yr. We performed a comprehensive set of measurements to reveal the kinematic and thermal state of the plasma in each knot, using a combined analysis of two high energy […]
Kavli Affiliate: Erotokritos Katsavounidis | Summary:The sensitivity of searches for astrophysical transients in data from the LIGO is generally limited by the presence of transient, non-Gaussian noise artifacts, which occur at a high-enough rate such that accidental coincidence across multiple detectors is non-negligible. Furthermore, non-Gaussian noise artifacts typically dominate over the background contributed from stationary […]
Kavli Affiliate: John Belcher | Summary:We compare the nature of electromagnetic fields and of gravitational fields in linearized general relativity. We carry out this comparison both mathematically and visually. In particular the "lines of force" visualizations of electromagnetism are contrasted with the recently introduced tendex/vortex eigenline technique for visualizing gravitational fields. Specific solutions, visualizations, and […]
Kavli Affiliate: Edmund Bertschinger | Summary:The metric of a perturbed Robertson-Walker spacetime is characterized by three functions: a scale-factor giving the expansion history and two potentials which generalize the single potential of Newtonian gravity. The Newtonian potential induces peculiar velocities and, from these, the growth of matter fluctuations. Massless particles respond equally to the Newtonian […]
Kavli Affiliate: Edmund Bertschinger | Summary:We investigate the observational consequences of the quintessence field rolling to and oscillating near a minimum in its potential, "if" it happens close to the present epoch (z<0.2). We show that in a class of models, the oscillations lead to a rapid growth of the field fluctuations and the gravitational […]
Kavli Affiliate: John Belcher | Summary:We present a new algorithm for computing the electromagnetic fields of currents inside and outside of finite current sources, for arbitrary time variations in the currents. Unexpectedly, we find that our solutions for these fields are free of the concepts of differential calculus, in that our solutions only involve the […]