Latest news with #BenjaminRose
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Free summer events: Capoeira class, ‘Cowboy Carter' contest, and more
ROCK AND ROLL Children, adults, and dogs alike are welcome at the Kendall/MIT Open Space for a day of play. This week's Play+ event is DIY pet rocks: Organizers provide crafting materials and the activity will be guided by Open Space Programming staff. Indulge in more fresh air fun with a variety of board and lawn games, including cornhole, hopscotch, and Bananagrams. July 29, 5-7 p.m. Kendall/MIT Open Space, 292 Main St., Cambridge. Advertisement Attendees can paint pet rocks at the Kendall/MIT Open Space on Tuesday, among other activities. Noah Phoenix/MIT Open Space Programming Advertisement WORK IT OUT Working out can sometimes feel isolating — Wednesdays, 6:30-7:30 p.m. Speare Diamond, Huntington Avenue. NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM On the last Thursday of each month, the Harvard Art Museums stay open for a bit of after-hours fun. A DJ takes over the historic courtyard, and attendees can take part in a scavenger hunt or painting and coloring activities. If you want a more peaceful night to explore the museums further, guided tours of their 50-plus galleries will be available throughout the night. July 31, 5-9 p.m. Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge. North End Music & Performing Arts Center holds its Jazz in the Park series on Thursdays during the summer. Benjamin Rose Photography FRESH TUNES The North End Music & Performing Arts Center presents its seasonal Jazz in the Park series, which hosts free concerts by the Boston Public Market. On Thursday, Albino Mbie, who was raised in Mozambique and graduated from Berklee, will bring his unique blend of Afro-pop and jazz infused with Mozambican influences. July 31, 6:30-8 p.m. Rose Kennedy Greenway, Cross and Hanover streets. Free performances will take place in Seven Hills Park for this year's Somer Fest. Colgan B. Johnson/1981andCo FUNK AND GAMES Right by the MBTA's Davis stop, the Seven Hills Park will be host to four music acts — funk, hip-hop, singer-songwriter, and a DJ — playing a variety of family-friendly music by artists of color. Concertgoers can also play giant Jenga, Connect Four, and cornhole, or grab a lawn chair and enjoy the show. Vendors selling Salvadoran food and Vietnamese fusion drinks will also be present. Aug. 2, 3-5 p.m. Seven Hills Park, Davis Square, Somerville. Advertisement YOUR FIRST RODEO Find some Southern hospitality south of South Boston at the third annual Family Day Rodeo Event, where you'll be greeted by a live DJ, a mechanical bull, bouncy houses, face paints, and rodeo-themed photo booths. If you're looking to show off your brims, boots, and buckles, you can compete in a runway show where Beyoncé's 'Cowboy Carter' is the theme. All activities and attractions are free, but Caribbean and soul food, ice cream, and lemonade will be available for purchase from food trucks on site. Aug. 3, 1-6 p.m. Reverend Loesch Family Park, 20 Wainwright St. Ryan Yau can be reached at
Yahoo
20-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA's Roman Space Telescope could discover 100,000 new cosmic explosions: 'We're definitely expecting the unexpected'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. It's little wonder that astronomers are excited for the launch of NASA's next big space telescope project, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. Recent research has suggested that Roman, currently set to launch no later than May 2027, will discover as many as 100,000 powerful cosmic explosions as it conducts the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey observation program. These powerful and violent events will include supernovas that signal the deaths of massive stars, kilonovas, which happen when two of the universe's most extreme dead stars, or "neutron stars," slam together, and "burps" of feeding supermassive black holes. Roman could even detect the explosive destruction of the universe's first generation of stars. These explosions could help scientists crack the mystery of dark energy, the placeholder name for the strange force that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate, and a multitude of other cosmic conundrums. "Whether you want to explore dark energy, dying stars, galactic powerhouses, or probably even entirely new things we've never seen before, this survey will be a gold mine," research leader Benjamin Rose, an assistant professor at Baylor University, said in a statement. Roman will hunt white dwarfs that go boom! The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will obtain its explosive results by scanning the same large region of space every five days for a period of two years. These observations will then be "stitched together" to create movies revealing a wealth of cosmic explosions. Many of these will be Type Ia supernovas, a type of cosmic explosion that occurs when a "dead star" or white dwarf feeds on a companion star so ravenously that it blows its top. These cosmic explosions are vital to astronomers because their light output and peak brightness are so regular from event to event that they can be used to measure cosmic distances. This regularity means astronomers refer to Type Ia supernovas as "standard candles." This new research, which simulated Roman's entire High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, suggests the space telescope could reveal up to 27,000 new Type Ia supernovas. That is about 10 times as many of these white dwarf destroying explosions as the combined harvest of all previous surveys. By looking at standard candles across differing vast distances, astronomers are essentially looking back into cosmic time, and that allows them to determine how fast the universe was expanding at these times. Thus, such a wealth of Type Ia supernovas should reveal hints at the secrets of dark energy. This could help verify recent findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) that suggest this strange force is actually weakening over time. "Filling these data gaps could also fill in gaps in our understanding of dark energy," Rose explained. "Evidence is mounting that dark energy has changed over time, and Roman will help us understand that change by exploring cosmic history in ways other telescopes can't." Dying stars tell the tale of the stellar life cycle The team estimates that as many as 60,000 of the 100,000 cosmic explosions that could be detected by Roman will be so-called "core collapse supernovas." These occur when massive stars at least 8 times heavier than the sun reach the end of their nuclear fuel and can no longer support themselves against gravitational collapse. As these stars' cores rapidly collapse, the outer layers are blasted away in supernovas, spreading the elements forged by these stars through the cosmos to become the building blocks of the next generation of stars, their planets, and maybe even lifeforms dwelling on said planets. Core collapse supernovas leave behind either neutron stars or black holes, depending on the mass of the progenitor star. This means that while they can't help unravel the mystery of dark energy like Type Ia supernovas may, they can tell the tale of stellar life and death. "By seeing the way an object's light changes over time and splitting it into spectra — individual colors with patterns that reveal information about the object that emitted the light—we can distinguish between all the different types of flashes Roman will see," research team member Rebekah Hounsell from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center explained. "With the dataset we've created, scientists can train machine-learning algorithms to distinguish between different types of objects and sift through Roman's downpour of data to find them. "While searching for Type Ia supernovas, Roman is going to collect a lot of cosmic 'bycatch'—other phenomena that aren't useful to some scientists, but will be invaluable to others." Rare cosmic gems and pure gold kilonovas One of the rarer events that Roman could also detect occurs when black holes devour unfortunate stars that wander too close to them. During these tidal disruption events (TDEs), the doomed star is ripped apart by the tremendous gravitational influence of the black hole via the immense tidal forces it generates. Though much of the star is consumed by the black hole, these cosmic titans are messy eaters, meaning the vast amount of that stellar material is vomited out at velocities approaching the speed of light. This jet of matter and the stellar material of the destroyed star that settles around the black hole in a flattened swirling cloud called an accretion disk generate emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum. Roman will hunt these emissions to detect TDEs, with this team predicting that the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will turn up around 40 of these star-destroying events. Even more elusive than TDEs are kilonovas, explosive bursts of light that occur when two neutron stars smash together and merge. The team estimates that Roman could uncover around 5 new kilonovas, and while this is a small harvest, these observations could be vital to understanding where precious metals like gold and silver come from. Though most of the elements we see around us are generated at the heart of stars, even these stellar furnaces lack the pressures and temperatures needed to form elements heavier than iron. The environments around neutron star collisions are thought to be the only furnaces in the cosmos extreme enough to generate elements like gold, silver and plutonium. These would start life as even heavier elements that are unstable and rapidly decay. This decay releases the light seen as kilonovas, and thus studying that light is vital to understanding that process. The study of kilonovas could also help determine what types of celestial bodies are created when neutron stars merge. This could be an even larger neutron star that rapidly collapses into a black hole, an immediately formed black hole, or something entirely new and unthought of. Thus far, astronomers have only definitively confirmed the detection of one kilonova, meaning even another five would be a real boon to science. Roman looks for instability in the first stars Perhaps the most exciting cosmic explosion discovery that Roman could make would be the observation of the strange explosive death of the universe's first stars. Currently, it is theorized that these early massive stars may have died differently than modern stars. Rather than undergoing the core collapse described above, gamma-rays within the first stars could have generated matter-antimatter pairs in the form of electrons and positrons. These particles would meet and annihilate each other within the star, and this would release energy, resulting in a self-detonation called a "pair-instability supernova.' These blasts are so powerful that it is theorized that they leave nothing behind, barring the fingerprint of elements generated during that star's lifetime. As of yet, astronomers have dozens of candidates for pair-instability supernovas, but none have been confirmed. The team's simulation suggests that Roman could turn up as many as ten confirmed pair-instability supernovas. "I think Roman will make the first confirmed detection of a pair-instability supernova," Rose said. "They're incredibly far away and very rare, so you need a telescope that can survey a lot of the sky at a deep exposure level in near-infrared light, and that's Roman." Related Stories: — New kind of pulsar may explain how mysterious 'black widow' systems evolve — Hear 'black widow' pulsar's song as it destroys companion —NASA X-ray spacecraft reveals secrets of a powerful, spinning neutron star The team intends to perform a further simulation of Roman's study of the cosmos, which could indicate its capability to spot and even wider array of powerful and violent events, maybe even some that haven't yet been theorized. "Roman's going to find a whole bunch of weird and wonderful things out in space, including some we haven't even thought of yet," Hounsell concluded. "We're definitely expecting the unexpected." This research was published on Tuesday (July 15) in The Astrophysical Journal. Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
18-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA's new Roman Space Telescope aims to discover 100,000 cosmic explosions
While the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes continue to offer astronomers revolutionary glimpses of our universe, their upcoming sibling may very well upstage them. Scheduled to launch in 2027, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is designed with a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, with the potential to document light from over a billion galaxies over its career. Combined with timelapse recording capabilities, Roman will help researchers to better understand exoplanets, infrared astrophysics, and the nature of dark matter. But it doesn't stop there. According to a study published on July 15 in The Astrophysics Journal, Roman is poised to eventually capture an estimated 100,000 celestial explosions over its lifetime. These could include everything from supernovae to hungry black holes, but astrophysicists theorize Roman may potentially even find evidence of the very first stars to ever form in the universe. Galactic 'gold mine' 'Whether you want to explore dark energy, dying stars, galactic powerhouses, or probably even entirely new things we've never seen before, this survey will be a gold mine,' Benjamin Rose, a physicist at Baylor University and the study's lead author, said in a statement. Rose and colleagues reached their estimate after running a simulation of the Roman's High-Latitude Time-Domain Core Community Survey. Once in place, the space telescope's survey is designed to scan a single, vast portion of the universe every five days for two years. Astronomers will compile all of those snapshots into what amounts to cosmic movies, then document every kind of energy blast they find. 'By seeing the way an object's light changes over time and splitting it into spectra—individual colors with patterns that reveal information about the object that emitted the light—we can distinguish between all the different types of flashes Roman will see,' explained Rebekah Hounsell, a study co-author and assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Peering back in time The majority of events will likely be various types of exploding stars, or novae. The telescope's survey itself is particularly oriented to detect a rarer class of stellar bursts known as Type Ia supernovae. These cosmic mileage posts help researchers measure cosmic distances and analyze the universe's expansion rate. As NASA explains, understanding the speed of expansion amid various epochs can key astronomers into dark matter's behavior. Based on this study's simulation, Roman's handlers can expect to find about 27,000 Type Ia supernovae. That's more than 10 times the number collected by all previous surveys. Peering further into the depths of space also means Roman will glimpse further back into time than any telescope before it. Most supernovae detected so far by astronomers have occurred within the last 8 billion years. Roman is expected to push that timeline back to over 10 billion years ago— and possibly even as far as 11.5 billion years. 'Filling these data gaps could also fill in gaps in our understanding of dark energy,' said Rose. 'Evidence is mounting that dark energy has changed over time, and Roman will help us understand that change by exploring cosmic history in ways other telescopes can't.' The simulation dataset created by Rose's team isn't limited to their own study. According to Hounsell, other experts can use it to develop their own machine-learning algorithms to comb through Roman's gigantic troves of data for their own subjects. 'While searching for type Ia supernovae, Roman is going to collect a lot of cosmic 'bycatch'—other phenomena that aren't useful to some scientists, but will be invaluable to others,' explained Hounsell. One such phenomena may be multiple kilonovae—gargantuan explosions that result when a neutron star (a leftover supernova core) slams into another neutron star. Astronomers theorize that kilonovae may also occur when a neutron star collides with a black hole. Researchers have only officially ever documented a single such event, but the study's authors believe the Roman telescope could pinpoint another five of them. These anticipated discoveries only scratch the surface of what Roman could achieve. However, engineers must first finish the telescope and successfully launch it into orbit. The launch is currently scheduled no earlier than May 2027. NASA's multibillion dollar budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration may jeopardize the Roman project, despite its potential completion ahead of time and cheaper than expected. 'This is nuts,' former co-chair of Roman's science team David Spergel told Scientific American earlier this year. 'You've built it, and you're not going to do the final step to finish it? That is such a waste of taxpayers' money.'However, It's by no means a death sentence for Roman just yet. As of July 15, Congress was in talks to reject the majority of the White House's proposed NASA cuts. Solve the daily Crossword
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Business Standard
16-07-2025
- Science
- Business Standard
NASA's Roman telescope to unlock 100,000 cosmic explosions in major survey
NASA's soon-to-launch Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is gearing up for a cosmic fireworks show unlike any other. According to a new study, one of its most ambitious sky surveys could uncover over 100,000 cosmic explosions — from brilliant supernovae to ravenous black holes — offering science enthusiasts and astrophysicists a potential treasure trove of discoveries. At the heart of this celestial hunt lies the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, an ambitious program that will observe the same vast patch of sky every five days over two years. These repeated scans will be stitched into detailed time-lapse 'movies' of the universe, capturing dynamic events as they unfold across billions of light-years. 'Whether you want to explore dark energy, dying stars, galactic powerhouses, or entirely new cosmic phenomena, this survey will be a gold mine,' said Benjamin Rose, assistant professor at Baylor University and lead author of the new study published in The Astrophysical Journal. Why it matters: a window into dark energy and ancient stars Among the most sought-after events are Type Ia supernovae — thermonuclear explosions of white dwarfs in binary systems. These stellar blasts shine with near-uniform brightness, making them perfect 'standard candles' to measure vast cosmic distances. Roman is expected to spot 27,000 of them, more than 10 times the total found by all previous surveys combined. Crucially, Roman's deep gaze will peer farther into the universe, and further back in time, than ever before. It could detect supernovae from over 11.5 billion years ago, potentially setting a new record for the farthest-known Type Ia explosion. Such data is critical in refining our understanding of dark energy, the mysterious force that's accelerating the universe's expansion. Evidence suggests that dark energy might have evolved over time, and Roman could help confirm this by mapping how the universe expanded across different epochs. 'Filling these data gaps could also fill in gaps in our understanding of dark energy,' said Rose. 'Roman will explore cosmic history in ways other telescopes can't.' Not just supernovae: a cosmic jackpot While Type Ia supernovae are the stars of the show for cosmologists, Roman will also observe about 60,000 core-collapse supernovae — explosions of massive stars that burn through their fuel and collapse. It may also detect feeding black holes, luminous kilonovae from neutron star mergers, and perhaps signatures of the universe's first stars, believed to self-destruct without leaving any trace. Distinguishing between these various cosmic explosions is a challenge. But scientists plan to use machine learning algorithms, trained on Roman's massive dataset, to sort through the incoming flood of data. 'Roman is going to collect a lot of cosmic 'bycatch'—phenomena that might be irrelevant to some but gold for others,' said Rebekah Hounsell, co-author of the study and research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. With science operations expected to begin in 2027, Roman is poised to deliver a new era of time-domain astronomy—watching the cosmos in motion, and catching its most spectacular moments in the act.
