After analyzing more than 100 years of data, Clemson University astrophysicists, Pablo Penil del Campo, Marco Ajello, and Sagar Adhikari, may have found binary supermassive black holes.
In our universe, galaxies collide with other galaxies and, in the process, the supermassive black holes at the core of the galaxes will form a pair.
“Penil and his collaborators studied five blazars. He found that PG 1553+113, which Penil described as the most well-known blazar in the context of periodicity behavior, exhibited evidence of a 2.2 quasi-periodic oscillation in radio, optical, ultraviolet (UV) and gamma-ray bands.”
VJ Mattison and J Jones, undergraduate students in the Physics and Astronomy Department, presented their research at the CU2MIP. CU2MIP is the Conference for Undergraduate Underrepresented Minorities in Physics.
J Jones (left) and VJ Mattison (right)
They presented their poster titled “Advancing Blazar and Galactic Source Identification with Multiwavelength and Machine Learning”.
Clemson University Goldwater scholars. (Maggie Marte second to the left)
Our very own physics undergraduate student, Maggie Marte, is one of the 5 students at Clemson University that have been awarded the Goldwater scholarship. The 2024 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship recognizes students who show exceptional promise of advancing research in mathematics, natural sciences and engineering. This scholarship provides recipients with $7,500 in financial support towards their undergraduate studies and associated expenses for up to two years.
Our department volunteers who made this event possible! Photo credit: Amanda Ellenburg
On April 8th, 2024, the Clemson University department of Physics and Astronomy hosted an eclipse event, and it was a huge success! There was so much happening on campus and so many fun stations for both the Clemson Community and the public. There was eclipse science taking place in the planetarium, presentations on general relativity, pinhole cameras, liquid nitrogen ice cream, and telescope viewing. News reporters from Fox 8 and WYFF News were filming live throughout the day. The department provided eclipse glasses for safe viewing and started the event with 4000 eclipse glasses and ran out! Over 4000 people came to see the eclipse on campus!
None of this would have been possible without the help of our faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students. Thank you to everyone who came out and to our lovely volunteers.
Stephen Kaeppler, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, will receive a five-year National Foundation CAREER Grant of $721,601 to continue his research into observational and modeling investigations of pulsating aurora electrodynamics.
What are Auroras? They are unimaginable light shows that shower the north and south poles. They occur due to the interaction of charged particles from the sun with atoms in the upper atmosphere. They are known as the “aurora borealis/australis” or the Northern/Southern lights. Kaeppler’s research is focused on pulsating auroras. He will be able to continue his work and fund more educational opportunities for Clemson undergraduates.
Chad has been a part of the department for 20 years and has been interim department chair twice during his time at Clemson. His invaluable leadership and experience have landed him the position of department chair, effective April 1st.
“Physics and Astronomy at Clemson University is poised to expand and contribute to the overall University mission in positive and transformative ways, with prominent academic, research and outreach efforts. I am honored to have the chance to guide us on this journey, leveraging our continued excellence to support groundbreaking scientific discoveries that will positively impact all the communities we serve.” -Chad Sosolik
On March 8th, 2024, we had volunteers from the Clemson University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy prepare the Clemson Elementary school science fair winners for their presentations at regionals. This proved to be a great success because these students won 4 out of 10 of the awards that were given out that day! We are all so proud of these students and thankful to our volunteers that make time to help with events like these. Encouraging children to pursue their interests in STEM related fields is extremely important! Our department has supported Clemson Elementary School with their science fair for the past 10 years and we will gladly continue supporting events like these.
Alex McDaniel, a postdoctoral, and Marco Ajello, an associate professor, in the Clemson University Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Alex McDaniel is a postdoctoral fellow in the Clemson University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy and his collaborators search dwarf galaxies for dark matter “that self-annihilates into ordinary matter and gamma rays, a form of light at the highest energy levels. Dwarf galaxies are ideal for study because they are small, rich in dark matter and mostly lack other astrophysics phenomena such as gas, dust and supernova that could contaminate the findings.” McDaniel explains that they specifically look for these because they can give a clear signal or can help rule out certain particle theories.
Donald D. Clayton, Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy (March 18, 1935—January 3, 2024).
Donald Clayton was born in Shenandoah, Iowa and grew up Dallas, TX. He earned a B.S. in Physics in 1956 from Southern Methodist University, where he also played on the golf team. He then attended the California Institute of Technology, where he earned his Ph.D. under the mentorship of Nobel Laureate William Alfred Fowler in 1961. After two years as a postdoctoral fellow there, he became one of the founding faculty members of Rice University’s Department of Space Science (later Space Physics and Astronomy) in 1963. He established nuclear astrophysics there, publishing many seminal ideas in gamma-ray astronomy and cosmochemistry, and developed and published his famous textbook Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis. During his Rice tenure, as Andrew Hays Buchanan Professor of Astrophysics, he also held visiting positions in Cardiff, UK, and enjoyed sabbatical leaves at Cambridge, Heidelberg, and Durham University, UK.
In 1989, Clayton moved to Clemson University, tasked with developing an astronomy program. He established a group in nuclear astrophysics and gamma-ray astronomy, which thrives today. He hosted many renowned physicists and astronomers as visitors to Clemson, and he developed the unique Photo Archive in Nuclear Astrophysics. His advice helped guide department chairs and deans in Clemson’s development of its research culture. Clayton retired in 2007, but remained active in research until very recently. He wrote several books, including a science fiction novel, a scientific memoir, and a handbook of the isotopes.
Among Clayton’s many scientific accomplishments, he developed the first quantitative analysis of the slow neutron capture process for forming heavy elements in stars, he predicted many of the effects of radioactivity in supernovae, including that gamma rays from it would be detectable, and he explained how radioactivity abundances evolved in the interstellar medium. Clayton advanced new ideas of nuclear astrophysics manifested in meteorites, including of radioactive chronometers, of stardust particles – dust grains that survived from formation in stars to their incorporation in solar system bodies, and of cosmic chemical memory – that isotopic signatures of stellar nucleosynthesis could be recovered even when the dust carriers had not survived. These ideas received much pushback from the meteoritic community over more than a decade, but Clayton was later awarded the Leonard Medal, the highest honor of the Meteoritical Society, in 1991.
In his Nobel address, Fowler said, “Of my 50 graduate students who have contributed to the field I must single out Donald D. Clayton.”
A Memorial Service will be on March 16, 2024 at 11:00 am at Seneca Presbyterian Church in Seneca, SC. The Donald D. Clayton Memorial Fund for support of graduate student research in astrophysics and meteoritics has been established in his memory.
Illustration courtesy of Luciano Rezzolla, University of Frankfurt, Germany
Dieter Hartmann and an international team of astronomers “obtained observational evidence for the creation of rare heavy elements in the aftermath of a cataclysmic explosion triggered by the merger of two neutron stars.” They were studying a massive gamma-ray burst named GRB230307A, which was first detected on March 7, 2023. Scientists discovered that this burst resulted from two neutron stars merging in a distant galaxy.
“The breakthrough discovery puts astronomers one step closer to solving the mystery of the origin of elements that are heavier than iron.”
