College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences

THE PRESS-ENTERPRISE - UC Riverside will salute physicist and Nobel laureate Barry Barish for winning the 2023 National Medal of Science in October. Barish, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, joined the university in 2018. The National Medal of Science is the highest recognition in the nation for scientists and engineers. The...

LIVE SCIENCE - Researchers may have solved the mystery of why a distant galaxy surrounded by an eerily perfect "Einstein ring" is denser than it should be: The hefty galaxy, which was discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is being compressed by a massive halo of dark matter. In a new study, published...

SPACE.COM - A fresh analysis of a remarkably massive yet compact galaxy from the early universe suggests that dark matter interacts with itself. The galaxy, JWST-ER1, which formed just 3.4 billion years after the Big Bang, was first spotted last October in images snapped by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). At over 17 billion...

EARTH.COM - A team of researchers led by Hai-Bo Yu, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, has shed new light on the enigmatic nature of dark matter through the lens of an ancient galaxy. The study focuses on JWST-ER1g, a massive ancient galaxy discovered by the James Webb Space...

ASTRONOMY MAGAZINE - Maybe dark matter talks to itself, according to a new proposal, and that might just explain two cosmological mysteries at once. Dark matter is the name astronomers give to the mysterious substance that makes up the bulk of all matter in the universe. Upwards of 80 percent of the mass of a...

THE HIGHLANDER NEWSPAPER - Professor Barish began his role at Riverside in 2018, after winning the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his observations of gravitational waves which contributed to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In an exclusive interview with the Highlander News, he states that the LIGO Lab’s research, which he received the Nobel...

SPACE.COM - A new theory that suggests dark matter is made up of particles that strongly interact with each other via a so-called "dark force." If true, this may finally explain the extreme densities we see in dark matter haloes surrounding galaxies. The existence of particles called self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) acts as an alternative...

CNN - Astronomers have spied an intriguing phenomenon in the distant universe — a galaxy that closely resembles the Milky Way — and it’s challenging key theories on how galaxies evolve. The faraway system, called ceers-2112, was spotted by an international team using the James Webb Space Telescope. Like our home galaxy, the newly discovered...

MASHABLE - Astronomers previously thought it took billions of years for galaxies to become stable enough to develop so-called "bars," ribbons of stars and gas that cut across the core of a galaxy. The Milky Way is an example of a barred spiral galaxy. But a new James Webb Space Telescope discovery means scientists might...

PHYSICS WORLD - Taking inspiration from the flow of air around aeroplane wings, researchers in the US have imaged photoexcited electrons flowing around sharp bends for the first time. Because such bends are often found in integrated optoelectronic circuits, observing the electrons’ “streamlines” could lead to improvements in circuit design. More than 80 years ago...