Category: Science

With support from the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Division of Physical Sciences at UC San Diego has established the Margaret Burbidge Visiting Professorship, part of an effort to bring eminent female physicists to the university for collaborative research within its Department of Physics. Three visiting professors from Columbia University, ESPCI Paris, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will fill the inaugural role beginning in the fall.

The GRAVITY instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has made the first direct observation of an exoplanet using optical interferometry. The result was presented last month in the paper, “First Direct Detection of an Exoplanet by Optical Interferometry,” published in the scientific journalAstronomy and Astrophysics.One ofthe study’s co-authors is 51 Pegasi …

The Heising-Simons Foundation is pleased to announce the 2019 recipients of the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship in planetary astronomy. Recipients are recognized for their outstanding research achievements, their creativity, and their great promise in tackling risky and novel ideas. Since its inception in 2016, the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship has supported early-career scientists at a …

Today the Heising-Simons Foundation is thrilled to announce the latest cohort of 51 Pegasi b Fellows. These six fellows represent some of the best and brightest minds launching careers in planetary astronomy, and we are humbled to play a small part in helping develop their talents. At the same time, the Foundation’s Science program would …

The research board at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), which operates the LHC, has approved the Forward Search Experiment, or FASER. Initiated by physicists at the University of California, Irvine, the multiyear FASER project is funded by grants of $1 million each from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Simons Foundation, with additional support from CERN. The experiment will operate along the beam trajectory of the LHC, which creates new particles by smashing protons together at nearly the speed of light.

The AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program pairs student scientists with senior editors at media organizations across the United States to communicate scientific ideas to a broad audience. The competitive fellowship kicks off in June with a three-day orientation and training session, followed by the fellows spending 10 weeks working at their respective mass media hosts. At the end of summer, the fellows convene again in Washington, D.C., to share their successes and participate in professional development workshops focused on science communications.

The Precision Reactor Oscillation and Spectrum Experiment (PROSPECT) has completed the installation of a novel detector that will probe the possible existence of a new form of matter.

Last month, the Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) announced that it has achieved the necessary sensitivity to sense dark matter axions – theoretically predicted particles that might constitute the missing matter in the universe. The breakthrough, detailed in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters, makes ADMX the only experiment ever built to attain such precision.

We are tremendously proud of the eight new 51 Pegasi b Fellows announced earlier this week. They are among the finest in the field, and we celebrate their selection. But we also realize that our program has room for improvement with respect to gender diversity, and we’d like to thank our astronomy colleagues for calling us on where we have fallen short. Their feedback has brought reflection, self-critique, and, hopefully, change and improvement. We are especially appreciative of the feedback because our Foundation is funding projects to address gender inequities in physics and astronomy in the U.S.