Physics

The UK audio science fiction magazine Starship Sofa has published a podcast of "Descartes' Stepchildren," a short story by Robert Scherrer, professor and chair of the Vanderbilt's department of physics and astronomy. Read More

Two Vanderbilt astronomers are among an international team that has discovered a surprising new class of “hypervelocity stars” – solitary stars moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy. Read More

More can be done with sun-powered electricity source, writes Dennis Hall, vice provost for research, dean of the Graduate School, professor of physics and professor of electrical engineering. Read More

The reason dark matter, which makes up 85 percent of all the matter in the universe, is invisible could be because it possesses a rare, donut-shaped type of electromagnetism instead of the more exotic forces that have been proposed, according to an analysis of a pair of Vanderbilt theoretical physicists. Read More

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, may have created the smallest drops of liquid made in the lab. Read More

A team of Vanderbilt astronomers will play a key role in the planet-seeking space telescope that NASA has just approved and scheduled for launch in 2017. Read More

This year the Fisk–Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge program, directed by Keivan Stassun, professor of astronomy, will become the nation’s No. 1 producer of minority Ph.D. recipients in physics, astronomy and materials science. Read More

A Vanderbilt engineering graduate student has created a small-scale, efficient way to produce high-energy density plasma--the state of matter found in the center of stars and gas giants like Jupiter--with a tabletop device. Read More

Two astronomers from Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, sharing a car after a snowstorm canceled their flights home from a conference, put together everything they had learned at the conference during that snowy drive and worked out that a collision between two black holes could explain most of what is known of a violent episode in the Milky Way's past. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy and physics, wraps up this three-part podcast series with an interview about her specialty, supermassive black holes. Read More