Christoph Weniger (Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, Germany) will present the SSL colloquium on May 3rd: `Recently, we identified a tentative gamma-ray line in the Galactic center
observations of the Fermi LAT, which would be an unequivocal smoking-gun
signature for dark matter annihilation in the Universe. One year after
discovery, the signature is still as ambiguous as it could be. I discuss
recent experimental and theoretical developments and show how the situation
could be clarified until end of next year.’

Lindsay Glesener  (UC Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory) will present the SSL colloquium on Friday, April 26, 2013: “Studying X-Rays from Solar Flares with the FOXSI Rocket.”  More info

Richard Lieu, Dept. of Physics, University of Alabama in Huntsville

SSL Addition Conference Room at 3pm Tuesday December 18th

Since the mid 1990’s it has been increasingly apparent that material in and around clusters of  galaxies is multi-phased, consisting of dark matter and hot, virialized X-ray emitting gas, and also cooler gases and possibly non-thermal particles. The early evidence for the latter two components was from  EUV and soft X-ray observations from which it was inferred that a warm gas component lies predominantly at the outskirts of the cluster while relativistic particles may exist in the inner parts. Continue reading →

Christian Reichardt  (UC Berkeley, Physics department) is the speaker of the SSL colloquium of Friday December 7th 2012 entitled “By Dawn’s Early Light – what we are learning from new measurements of the cosmic microwave background”. More info

Harvey Tananbaum (CfA, Harvard) is the speaker of the SSL colloquium of Friday November 30th 2012 entitled “SMART-X – Square Meter, Arcsecond Resolution Telescope for X-rays Whither X-ray Astronomy post-Chandra?”. More info

Nico Cappelluti (INAF-Bologna, Italy) is the speaker of the SSL colloquium of Friday November 16th 2012 entitled “Clustering of the Cosmic X-ray Background”. More info

Michael Sholl (UC Berkeley – SSL) is the speaker of the SSL colloquium of Friday November 9th 2012 entitled “BigBOSS: A stage IV dark energy redshift survey”. More info

Vahe Petrosian (Stanford) is the speaker of the SSL colloquium of Friday November 2nd 2012 entitled “Non-Parametric Determination of the Particle Acceleration
Characteristics Directly From Observations of Solar Flares and Supernova
Remnant”. More info