Date: 08/25/2009

San José State Professors Contribute to Planetary and Gravitational Discoveries

Contact:
Pat Lopes Harris, SJSU Media Relations, 408-924-1748

SAN JOSÉ, Calif., -- San José State University physics and astronomy professors contributed to space research published this month in the nation's most respected journals.

Distant Worlds

In March, Associate Professor Natalie Batalha traveled to Florida to watch NASA launch one of the most important satellites to date, the $591 million, 2,300-pound Kepler spacecraft. Kepler is NASA's first mission designed to find Earth-size planets with the right surface temperature for liquid water. Batalha is a member of Kepler's exoplanet scientific team.

Kepler's space telescope has since detected the atmosphere of a known giant gas planet, demonstrating the telescope's extraordinary scientific capabilities. The discovery was published in the journal Science. An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than our sun.

Batalha recently presented "Planetary Systems as Potential Sites for Life" at the XXVIIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She also appeared on the television program "Tech Closeup," and spoke to an audience of 300 at the Cushing Memorial Theater 2009 astronomy lecture series at Mount Tamalpais State Park.

Big Bang

Professor Peter Beyersdorf is on a team whose findings on the origins of the universe were published in the journal Nature. The team's analysis of data collected from 2005 to 2007 set the most stringent limits yet on gravitational waves produced by the Big Bang. In doing so, scientists put new constraints on how the universe looked in its earliest moments.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of such waves in 1916 with his general theory of relativity. Gravitational waves carry information that cannot be obtained by conventional astronomical tools. The LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Scientific Collaboration is comprised of 700 scientists at universities across the United States and 11 foreign countries.

Read more on Batalha's research.

Read more on Beyerdorf's research.

San José State -- Silicon Valley's largest institution of higher learning with 30,000 students and 5,700 employees -- is part of the California State University system. SJSU's 154-acre downtown campus anchors the nation's 10th largest city.