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Astronomical Research at TAMU

Astronomical Research at TAMU. Faculty. Future facilities and projects. Nick Suntzeff March 2006 Lifan Wang October 2006 Kevin Krisciunas November 2006 Casey Papovich April 2008 Darren DePoy June 2008

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Astronomical Research at TAMU

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  1. Astronomical Research at TAMU Faculty Future facilities and projects

  2. Nick Suntzeff March 2006 Lifan Wang October 2006 Kevin Krisciunas November 2006 Casey Papovich April 2008 Darren DePoy June 2008 Lucas Macri July 2008 Kim-Vy Tran November 2008 Our activities have been (will be) in the areas of supernova research, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, large scale structure, astronomical instrumentation.....

  3. The ESSENCE Project – a supernova search being carried out with the 4-m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile

  4. Compared to the “empty universe model” or a model of the universe having gravitating matter, distant supernovae are too faint by a stastistically significant amount. The medians shown above imply the existence of a non-zero vacuum energy that is causing the universe to accelerate.

  5. When the universe was small, the gravitational attrac- tion of all the matter was causing the universe's expansion to slow down. But several billion years ago the universe became large enough that the non-zero vacuum energy caused a shift to an accelerating universe.

  6. Future Projects Dome A, Antarctica Four 14.5-cm telescopes were installed in January, 2008. Will monitor a few thousand stars with a time resolution of 15 seconds. Three 1-m telescopes to be installed in Jan 2010. Will provide light curves of ~5000 supernovae over 4 years. Large survey of galaxies in polarized light. Will study Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and be used to search for extra-solar planets.

  7. New instruments for existing telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory 2.5-m 6.5-m

  8. Giant Magellan Telescope (7 X 8.2-m)

  9. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), an 8-m class telescope with a very wide camera, to be situated at Cerro Pachon in Chile. It will scan the entire sky visible at that latitude every few days. LSST will discover many thousands of supernova and asteroids.

  10. Prospects for graduate student research We have NSF money available now to pay a grad student or postdoc to work on the refinement of SN models. Carnegie Supernova Project (analysis ongoing) multi-longitude astronomy Spitzer Space Telescope and HST observing data from Antarctica

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