Bill Kurth was interviewed on the Dec. 21 BBC Science in Action program about the iconic Voyager 1 craft, which has started sending back nonsense data.   Kurth, who has worked on Voyager since its launch in 1977, reveals his personal and scientific connection to the mission.

In this AGU Eos article "The 21st Century’s “Music of the Spheres”about how data sonification is used to analyze and appreciate cosmic objects, Research Scientist/Engineer Bill Kurth describes how Voyager 1 recorded signals known as whistlers to detect lightning in the roiling clouds of Jupiter. The Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn for 13 years, similarly revealed lightning in the ringed planet’s atmosphere.

Professors Keri Hoadley and Casey DeRoo have been awarded Nancy Grace Roman Technology Fellowships in Astrophysics for Early Career Researchers.

In this article in the Washington Post, Prof. Jasper Halekas comments on the MAVEN spacecraft's observation in December 2022 of a sudden lull in the solar wind around Mars, with the density of the solar wind around Mars dropping by a factor of 100. Later in the article, Prof. Allison Jaynes discusses how low-density solar events in the Earth's atmosphere can disrupt communications and cause an unusually intense polar rain — a type of aurora.

Several students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy were candidates for degrees at the University of Iowa Fall Commencement ceremonies Dec. 15-16.

At an APS meeting in Denver, astrophysicist Allison Jaynes discussed her work on auroras and the strange plasma physics that shapes them. Jaynes, this year’s recipient of APS’s Katherine E. Weimer Award in plasma physics, discussed her research at this year’s meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics in Denver, Colorado.

Undergraduate physics student Jeff Leiberton was awarded a Student Presentation Prize for his poster presentation of "Towards Topological Magnons for Hybrid Magnonic Systems" at the 2023 Fall Meeting of the Prairie Section of the American Physical Society (APS) held Nov. 30 to Dec. 2 at the University of Missouri-Columbia. 

In December 2022, NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission observed the dramatic and unexpected "disappearance" of a stream of charged particles constantly emanating off the Sun, known as the solar wind. This was caused by a special type of solar event that was so powerful, it created a void in its wake as it traveled through the solar system.

Prof. Jasper Halekas leads research to explain the solar wind’s disappearance on Mars.

Prof. Jun Wang, who holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, is Iowa’s lead investigator on Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution or TEMPO. The space instrument is expected to help scientists understand the sources of pollution by revolutionizing how real-time air quality data is collected.