Four Berkeley Lab Scientists Receive DOE Early Career Research Awards - Berkeley Lab News Center (.gov)

The Roman Space Telescope realizes an idea conceived at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab. A Berkeley astronomer now leads a large group of scientists who hope to reap the benefits. NASA’s latest triumph, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will be unique in dumping 1.4 terabytes of data onto the internet every day with a clear message to astronomers and citizen scientists alike: Have at it! That’s where UC Berkeley’s Jessica Lu comes in. She and David Weinberg of Ohio State University have created a collaboration of scientists — nearly a thousand and growing — that has been meeting regularly for the past 18 months to determine the most efficient way to digest this daily deluge and mine it for new science.

NASA's latest triumph, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will be unique in dumping 1.4 terabytes of data onto the internet every day with a clear message to astronomers and citizen scientists alike: Have at it! That's where UC Berkeley's Jessica Lu comes in. She and David Weinberg of Ohio State University have created a collaboration of scientists - nearly a thousand and growing - that has been meeting regularly for the past 18 months to determine the most efficient way to digest this daily deluge and mine it for new science. "Roman is very different from all of our previous space telescopes," said Lu, a Berkeley associate professor of astronomy. "The telescope takes the data, and within 48 hours it's available to the entire world. As a result, we're planning to do science differently as well. The Roman Science Collaboration is a group of 900 astronomers that are interested in working together collectively to get out the highest-impact discoveries from the survey data.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Orcas are hunting great White Sharks around the world, scientists confirmThe killing of great whites by orcas has been reported in the waters of South Africa, California, and Australia, and the implications that the hunting behaviour would have on the marine ecosystem have been considered. In fact, it all started back on May 3, 2017, when the body of a female great white, weighing 1,100 kilograms, washed ashore in Gansbaai, close to Cape Town, with a deep gash through which its 90-kilogram liver had been extracted. Five more corpses of great whites appeared with similar wounds in the coming months, as claimed by shark biologist Alison Towner of Rhodes University. Two adult males, called Port and Starboard, who are supposed to be brothers judging by their dorsal fins that fold differently, were identified as the most probable perpetrators. The connection was officially established in 2022 based on video footage of a drone that caught three orcas chasing and biting a 3-meter great white off Mossel Bay. The sharks quickly disappeared from Dyer Island, one of the best places in the world to witness a great white.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.

Forests that stood on Mozambique's coast thousands of years ago now lie beneath shallow seas, and they have become fish-filled "peat reefs" with marine life comparable to coral reefs, researchers report in Scientific Reports. A team from the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies (BCSS) Ocean Observatory, led by Mario Lebrato, documented the submerged peat in the Bazaruto Archipelago in the Western Indian Ocean. BCSS, founded in 2017, describes itself as Africa's first permanent ocean observatory. Working with universities and institutions in the U. K., U. S. and Canada, the team believes it has carried out the first ecological study of peat reefs anywhere in the tropics. Old forests, new seafloorRadiocarbon dating shows the peat formed between about 300 and 5,000 years ago, and chemical analysis indicates it came mostly from coastal land plants and trees. Some samples contain up to 40% organic carbon by dry weight. Lebrato said the coastline has very little natural hard seabed, mostly shifting sand. As rising seas expose the old peat layers, they create rare solid habitat where marine life can settle, hide and feed.