The early stages of the universe recently became a little more clear thanks to UBC professor Dr. Gary Hinshaw. Hinshaw and the WMAP team — 27 scientists throughout the US, Canada, and the UK — received the Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics on December 3.
Astronomers recently spotted an object — originally called the Interstellar Minor Body A/2017 U1, and recently named ‘Oumuamua — on an hyperbolic orbit around the Sun. Identifying ‘Oumuamua is “the coolest thing that’s happened in planetary astronomy recently,” said Dr. Brett Gladman.
Sure, Pluto is an icy body that is cold enough to have year-round winter, but I don’t think your North Face jacket could handle the -223 C temperatures. Pluto’s longer years may be tempting, but who really wants to get in 90,560 Earth days of skiing in a single season?
Protoplanetary disks are the nurseries in which planets are born. You would have to have superhuman traits to throw around these disks, which can weigh hundreds of times the Earth’s mass and have an actively forming star in the middle.
Dr. Ingrid Stairs of UBC’s department of physics and astronomy is one of the world’s experts on pulsars. Her research into pulsars is so cutting edge that The Royal Society of Canada just presented her with the Rutherford Memorial Medal.
Life as a grad student is a uniquely chaotic and stressful experience. Then one day, if you’re like me, you stumble upon a comic strip that gets it.