Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor | Measuring the Cosmic Microwave Background @JohnsHopkins | Discovering when the universe first lit up #NSFfunded
San Pedro de Atacama, Chile | Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
New Reflective Half-Wave Plate Polarization Modulator with the team in Chile! Ready to install on the second 90 GHz telescope 📡 This greatly increases the speed at which we measure the CMB linear polarization 🏎️ For more on the modulator: https://t.co/4oDV1cghrL.
Congratulations to two stellar undergraduate CLASSmates, Lucie Afko and Seti Norris, who will be attending grad school in physics and astronomy next year at the University of British Columbia and City University of New York! Great job and good luck, Lucie and Seti! ❤️
Behold the mighty viscacha. These cuties come out to sun themselves on the rocks by the telescopes. It's good luck to spot a viscacha on the way to the site.
CLASSmates at the @JHUPhysicsAstro annual Physics Fair this past weekend! The fair attracts hundreds of Marylanders big and small for physics and astronomy activities and demos. 🚀
🚨 NEW PAPER in A&A: predictions of PWV in the Chajnantor area using AI techniques and our 183 GHz radiometer, improving current GFS forecasts in 12 and 24 hr horizons: https://t.co/vdDaJPCoVK @SimonsObs@CLASS_telescope@almaobs@ApexTelescope
Thanks to an epic effort by the Chile site team and by students and staff at JHU and Villanova, we have repaired our modulator and recovered from a brief down time!
https://t.co/4218zTfylL
Beautiful new reflective half-wave plate being made here. The copper sheen is about a kilometer's worth of 100 µm wire. Though admittedly with the handles and the color it looks like paella 🥘!
🚀 Science Fair day in San Pedro de Atacama, the main local community close to the telescopes 🇨🇱🫶 The CLASS site team Deniz and Jullianna created and hosted an interactive display about the telescopes and cosmology for students and other residents! 💫
We have achieved 🌟 First Light 🌟 with the second CLASS 90 GHz telescope. 🤩 The detector performance is looking good. A few things to clean up 🧹 before cosmological observations, but we are almost there!
Johns Hopkins researchers are part of an international team that has installed a new dark matter detector about two kilometers beneath the French Alps. The technology is designed to search for lighter dark matter particles that previous experiments could not detect. https://t.co/TNlfuiD2Em
!!! Congratulations to Rui Shi for successfully defending her PhD thesis: "Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor: From Instrumentation to Beyond the Standard Model" !!!
🇧🇷 Brazilian CLASSmates, Jullianna and Deniz, receive an official "Motion of Applause" from the city council of their hometown for their work with CLASS and the recent results! 👏
https://t.co/FRtiLAUf7e
🐝🐝🐝 The CLASS site team has been busy! 🐝🐝🐝 Here is a video of them assembling the new receiver, which comes together as nested layers. When operating, all layers are under vacuum, and outer layers thermally shield colder layers underneath. The innermost is at 0.05 Kelvin!