Essay written by Avie Loeb for Scientific American, "They’re nurtured by informal dialogues in environments where mistakes are tolerated and critical thinking is encouraged"... Read more about Where Do Ideas Come from?
Second year graduate student Juliana Garcia-Mejia traveled to her hometown, Medellín, to participate of Clubes de Ciencia (translation: Science Clubs), Colombia. Clubes de Ciencia is a non-profit organization founded in 2014 by a group of graduate students and postdocs from Harvard’s MCB & CCB departments and medical school. Read her first hand account of the trip.
"Atronomers are proposing a new model for the invisible material that makes up most of the universe: It is possible that a fraction of dark matter particles may have a tiny electrical charge."
Edo Berger also presented the Leo Goldberg prize for excellence in a senior thesis to Eden Girma. Eden is also a recipient of a University Hoopes Prize for the project entitled “Astrometric Detection of Intermediate Mass Black Holes.”
At the annual Awards Ceremony, Rita Fireman and Astronomy Chair Avi Loeb are seen presenting the Fireman Fellowship Award to Philip Cowperthwaite for this year's best dissertation in the field of Astrophysics at Harvard. This award is named in honor of Rita's husband, Edward Fireman, a long time physicist at the Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory. Phil is a student of Edo Berger and will be starting a Hubble Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena.
At the annual Awards Ceremony for the Department of Astronomy Edo Berger presented Leo Goldberg prizes for excellence in a senior thesis to Danielle Frostig,graduating senior.
"What is the distribution of sizes of black holes in our universe? Can black holes of any mass exist, or are there gaps in their possible sizes? The shape of this black-hole mass function has been debated for decades — and the dawn of gravitational-wave astronomy has only spurred further questions."
Garcia-Mejia: Last month, I was lucky enough to win a NASA lottery to attend the TESS launch as a VIP guest at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL. As is the case with rocket launches, there were a series of launch windows starting on April 16, 2018, at 6:32pm. As hundreds of scientists were getting ready to board the buses that would take us from the KSC visitor complex to the viewing site on April 16, a NASA representative crushed our launch-viewing dreams with a simple two words: "launch scrubbed". A second launch window did not open until Wednesday, April 18 at 6:51pm...
Pierre Christian (Harvard PhD, 2018) delivers his Keto Award talk at the ITC Luncheon on May 3, 2018 "Detecting gravitational lensing of gravitational waves"
Astronomy 100 students went on a group trip to FLWO over spring break this year. They went to the University of Arizona mirror lab, Biosphere 2 and observed for 3 nights on the 48" and 60" telescope atop Mt. Hopkins.
"The first challenge in the hunt for life elsewhere in our universe is to decide where to look. In a new study, two scientists examine whether Sun-like stars or low-mass M dwarfs are the best bet for hosting exoplanets with detectable life."
![Still from a simulation showing how black holes might interact in the chaotic cores of globular clusters. [Carl Rodriguez/Northwestern Visualization]](http://static.projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/styles/os_square_100_100/public/fig1-1-676x336.png?m=1526310517&itok=GU2QAIiL "Sizes of Black Holes Throughout the Universe")
![are the best targets in the search for primitive life. [NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech]](http://static.projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/styles/os_square_100_100/public/fig1-10-702x336.jpg?m=1525273270&itok=NS4sg_sT "Where Should We Look for Life?")