Eberly News

Tagged with Physics
Colin Komar

Alumni Spotlight: Colin Komar

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Briefly, describe your career path.

Cassak

WVU physicist helps hone in on what sparks one of the most explosive processes in the universe

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Scientists are making new discoveries about a process that causes some of the most explosive events in the universe. At the same time, they are answering questions about Earth’s magnetosphere – the protective bubble around Earth that shields the planet from the sun’s constant barrage of superheated, electrically charged particles.

Figure Credit: Danielle Futselaar — The 305-m Arecibo telescope and its suspended support platform of radio receivers is shown amid a starry night. From space, a sequence of millisecond-duration radio flashes are racing towards the dish, where they will be reflected and detected by the radio receivers. Such radio signals are called fast radio bursts, and Arecibo is the first telescope to see repeat bursts from the same source.

WVU astrophysicist part of research team that discovers mysterious cosmic radio bursts are found to repeat

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Figure Credit: Danielle Futselaar — The 305-m Arecibo telescope and its suspended support platform of radio receivers is shown amid a starry night. From space, a sequence of millisecond-duration radio flashes are racing towards the dish, where they will be reflected and detected by the radio receivers. Such radio signals are called fast radio bursts, and Arecibo is the first telescope to see repeat bursts from the same source.A global team of astronomers, including one from  West Virginia University, have for the first time detected repeating short-duration bursts of radio waves from an enigmatic source which is likely located well beyond the edge of the Milky Way galaxy. The findings indicate that these “fast radio bursts,” or FRBs, come from an extremely powerful object which occasionally produces multiple bursts in under a minute.