The lives of massive stars are characterized by companionship: these stars are almost always found in gravitationally bound pairs. As such massive binaries evolve further, their cores run out of nuclear fuel and the stars can explode as supernovae, leaving behind in their centers either a neutron star or a black hole. In most cases such an explosion would be fatal for the binary, and disrupt it. In some cases, however, the final phases of binary stellar evolution can produce two compact objects -either white dwarfs, neutron stars or black …
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This week Stockholm University and AlbaNova are hosting the 13th Marcel Grossmann Meeting. The triennial Grossmann meetings are organized by the ICRANet research institute, this year with Stockholm University and KTH as local partners.
The general theme of the Grossmann meetings is applications and theory relating to Einstein’s general relativity.
The Fermi/Swift gamma-ray burst Symposium 2012 was held in Munich 7-11 May 2012.
Recent results on the prompt and afterglow emissions in gamma-ray burst were discussed at the Fermi/Swift gamma-ray burst Symposium 2012 which was held in Munich 7-11 May 2012.
Among the most important issues presented was the recent gamma-polarisation measurement with IKAROS-GAP. Significant degrees of polarisation in several bursts have now been detected. In particular, the change in polarisation angle was significantly detected. It was speculated that this is due to variation in emission patches in very narrowly collimated …
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The Oskar Klein Centre will host the 7th TeV Particle Astrophysics conference at the Albanova Centre in Stockholm August 1-5, 2011.
The fields of high energy astrophysics, particle astrophysics and particle physics at colliders are dealing with some of the most pressing subjects in modern physics, in trying to understand the nature of dark matter and the origin of cosmic rays.
The results presented at the III Fermi symposium in Rome reflected, in particular, what a magnificent instrument the Fermi LAT is for observing active galactic nuclei and pulsars. The 2 source catalogue 2FGL was presented and will soon be released with 1888 sources. Much attention was given to the blazar 3C454.3 which has been monitored since the launch and has undergone a series of very bright outbursts.
The Fermi Symposium of 2011 in Rome has now reached its last day and we have heard many interesting talks, ranging all the way from dark matter to various astrophysical sources and observations. The OKC has been very well represented with participants both from the Department of Physics and the Department of Astronomy at Stockholm University and by the KTH group.
During the last three weeks, we were visited by an impressive list of cosmologists trying to make sense of what is driving the present accelerated expansion of the Universe. Recent observations suggest that we are approaching a de Sitter phase
Here is just a very brief summary of results that have been presented so far. (For an extensive blog coverage about the event, see this link.)
Unfortunately, Elena Aprile did not present the new results from Xenon100, but she said that they will be presented at a press conference in Gran Sasso in April. It seems that they have new accurate measurements of the efficiency L_eff over a substantial energy range, that of course will be crucial when interpreting the data.
In neutrino physics, the present buzz concerns the possibility of sterile neutrinos, as seems to be mildly preferred by cosmological data.
Cosmology, astrophysics, astroparticle physics
