Associate Professor David Miles has received a $33,947 award from NASA for the Multi-Mission MAGnetometer Denoising and Sensor Resiliency through Statistical Decomposition and ARtificial Intelligence (MAGSTAR) project.

Profs. Michael Flatte and Denis Candido collaborated on research that uses magnets to entangle qubits, the building blocks of quantum computers; the simple technique could unlock complex capabilities.

PhD students Sanjay Chepuri and Cecilia Fasano are among 80 University of Iowa undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers and scholars in the Dare to Discover campaign, sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research. The ninth installation of the campaign showcases UI researchers, scholars, and creators on banners hung in downtown Iowa City from January to March 2024.

Graduate student Jacob Payne went to school—but not just any school. Payne earlier this year attended NASA’s Astrophysics Mission Design School, the first ever in astrophysics offered by NASA that teaches grad students how to write proposals for grand-idea, big-budget missions.

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.