News
Colin won a best poster award for his poster "Gamma-Ray Propagation Signatures in AGN Spectra with VERITAS" at the High Energy Phenomena in Relativistic Outflows (HEPRO-VIII) conference, 23-26 Oct 2023 Paris (France).
Undergraduate students Laurel Carpenter, Pablo Drake CU'23, and Daniela Hikari Yano BC'23 make presentations at the 241st AAS meeting in Seattle in January 2023. Laurel's poster was entitled "Prospects for studying extended sources with the addition of Schwarzschild-Couder Telescopes to the CTA Southern Array." Pablo gave a talk on the target of opportunity (ToO) observations of flaring blazars with VERITAS, and Daniela's poster reported on studies of spectral curvatures in gamma-ray blazars, objects with relativistic jets pointed at the observer. Congratulations to all three for their great work! https://aas.org/meetings/aas241
Graduate student Colin Adams was awarded the 2022 Simon Swordy Outstanding Contribution award that "formally recognizes the significant contributions of early-career members of the collaboration in the critical service work that enables scientific publications of VERITAS, but do not necessarily result in any scientific publications directly." Colin was recognized for a broad range of technical contributions to both VERITAS and the pSCT, as well as significant participation and leadership in Diversity Equity and Inclusivity (DEI)activities. Read more here https://veritas.sao.arizona.edu/news/553-outstanding-2022. Congratulations to Colin!
Daniela Hikari Yano '23 used data from both the Fermi-LAT satellite and the VERITAS telescopes to study blazars, extremely powerful astrophysical objects powered by a black hole! She performed temporal and spectral analyses for a sample of bright TeV blazars using Bayesian blocks to define periods with steady flux and accounting for the absorption effect from the extragalactic background light (EBL). She presented her results at Undergraduate research session of the April 2022 meeting of the American Physical Society. Read more about Daniela's journey and research in this interview! https://yearofscience.barnard.edu/news/physics-major-daniela-hikari-yano-23
Successfully running a telescope array such as VERITAS, or building a new cutting-edge prototype such as the pSCT, is not an easy job. It requires a lot of behind-the-scenes work that not always gets a "refereed" recognition such as a publication in a peer-reviewed journal. For this reason, the VERITAS and now the pSCT collaboration yearly awards two outstanding contribution prizes to a graduate student and a postdoctoral researcher that performed critical service work enabling the science output of both telescopes. For 2022, the prizes were assigned to our student Deivid Ribeiro and researcher Qi Feng! Read more about their relentless work here https://veritas.sao.arizona.edu/news/537-outstanding-2021
The Columbia-DIAS-Yale (CDY) Initiative 2021 is a series of seminars/meetings established by Columbia University (New York), Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (Dublin), and Yale University (New Haven). The initiative will sponsor several activities: a series of introductory lectures on current topics (remotely in 2021), biennial summer schools (for PhD students and early career researchers), focused mini-workshops, and joint research projects. The first summer school is planned for 2022 in Dublin, and subsequently in the New York area. The initiative is aimed at motivated young researchers beginning their careers (in particular PhD students and early career postdocs), with a focus on addressing current topics in astroparticle physics, theory and phenomenology, observations, and interpretations. Other activities are also planned, such as the exchange of visitors between the institutions and the organization of small (in-person) group meetings focused on specialized topics.
Together with Felix Aharonian (DIAS), Paolo Coppi (Yale University) and Yuri Levin (Columbia University & CCA), Reshmi Mukherjee will guide us through the observations, phenomenology and theory of the most extreme and explosive events in our Universe.
Don't miss any of the upcoming events! https://cdy-institute.ie/index.php/events/. At this page you can find the next scheduled talks, as well as links to the past ones.
The prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory flies...to the other side of the Atlantic! Together with Dr. Serena Loporchio from INFN and University of Bari, Dr. Capasso will show high school students from Puglia, Italy, the beauty of gamma-ray astronomy and how science brings us closer, no matter how distant the countries or how hard the times! (The seminar will be held in Italian)
In this live appointment of the Nevis Laboratories "Science-on-Hudson" public lectures, Dr. Capasso guided the audience on a journey showing the humbling greatness of the Universe we live in, from the stars to the ground and upwards again.
With observations performed only one year after first light, the prototype Schwarzschild-Couder Telescope, an innovative dual-mirror gamma-ray telescope, detected its first source!
Our group at Barnard and Columbia contributed to this milestone for ground-based gamma-ray astronomy: check this out!
https://news.columbia.edu/scientists-detect-crab-nebula-using-gamma-ray-telescope
Reshmi Mukherjee, the Helen Goodhart Altschul professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College and spokesperson of the VERITAS Collaboration, is part of a team of leading astrophysicists from across the globe that has released the major scientific finding today that the VERITAS array has confirmed the detection of gamma rays from the vicinity of a supermassive black hole.
Read the full papers on Science and the Astrophysical Journal Letters
The Summer 2016 VERITAS and CTA-US collaboration meetings will be hosted by the Barnard and Columbia groups from July 18th to 23rd.
Barnard VERITAS members measure ancient light from early stars in our Universe using gamma rays.