MIT's Adventures In Sensing Course Presents:

Summary: As part of the "Adventures in Sensing' series, the MIT Media Lab Responsive Environments group invites you on an exciting journey to Antarctica, where unique and pristine conditions allow physicists to detect both subatomic and macroscopic particles originating from interstellar space - from neutrinos produced e.g. when a star is consumed by a black hole, to iron isotopes originating from a near-Earth Supernova explosion. Kilometer long, radiation-sensitive cable arrays in Antarctic ice and high precision chemical analysis of fresh snow have enabled this science - come hear more from our guest lecturers Prof. Justin Vandenbroucke (U. Wisc) and Prof. Brian Fields (U. Illinois).

Prof. Brian Fields: Brian Fields is an astrophysicist whose research focuses on the extreme environments of the big bang and exploding stars. As such, his work sits at the intersection of cosmology, nuclear physics, and particle physics. He is best known for his work on the formation of the elements hydrogen, helium, and lithium in the first seconds to minutes after the big bang.In his most recent work, Fields has joined forces with astrobiologists and paleontologists to examine nearby supernovae in the Earth’s past. He predicted that radioactive atoms are signatures of debris from these exploding stars. This was confirmed by detections of radioactive iron atoms in the deep ocean, the moon, and most recently in Antarctic snow, pointing to a supernova near Earth about 3 million years ago. In the more distant past, supernovae may explain for the loss of ozone that led to one or more mass extinction events in the late-Devonian period.

Prof. Justin Vandenbroucke: Justin Vandenbroucke is a professor at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC), in the Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, with a joint appointment in the Astronomy Department, since 2013. During 2012-2013 he was a NASA Einstein Fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). From 2009-2012 he was a Kavli Fellow at KIPAC. He received his PhD in Physics from UC Berkeley in 2009. His research interests include multi-messenger astrophysics, gamma-ray astronomy, neutrino astronomy, and cosmic-ray science. His group works on both data analysis and instrumentation development. Members of his group work on the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and the Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory (DECO).