UNO Physics

03/13/2025

Information about tonight's lunar eclipse can be found at:

Start time, end time, animation, and detailed viewing information for the upcoming eclipse in Omaha, Nebraska, USA

11/20/2024

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10154897937985164&set=a.10150189178410164

It's the birthday of Edwin Hubble, who was born in 1889 in Marshfield, Missouri. Hubble studied at the University of Chicago and Oxford. Following his father's wishes, he trained to become a lawyer, When his father died, he followed his own interests and trained to become an astronomer. He earned a PhD in astronomy at Chicago in 1917 and served briefly in the US army before joining the staff at Mount Wilson observatory in California. There in the late 1920s he discovered that galaxies' recessional velocity increases roughly in proportion to their distance from Earth. Hubble's discovery supported the notion of expanding universe, which Georges Lemaître had proposed based on Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. Hubble's famous paper was published in 1929. In a magazine interview that year he said, "Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science."

11/03/2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QarKXkXox6M

A Van de Graaff Machine can be specially helpful to learn about charges and high voltage, as well as very painful if you don’t handle it right!It would be pr...

07/03/2024

https://www.popsci.com/science/juno-salt-ocean-ganymede-jupiter/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3cr191QKTB7lafHFwzC00q_vZqucBKHV2WKO9SwFf7aDBoUp-uiEFuE0w_aem_ZUZegNKCevmxONO6zAOghQ

Ganymede is a particularly weird place. Not only is it Jupiter’s most massive satellite, it’s the biggest moon in the whole solar system.

06/26/2024

Happy 200th Birthday to William Thomson, AKA Lord Kelvin!

It's the birthday of William Thomson, who was born in 1824 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Thomson studied mathematics and physics at Cambridge University. At the age of 22 he was appointed physics professor at Glasgow University. Although Thomson had wide interests, including electromagnetism, his research focused on establishing a mathematical framework for thermodynamics, including its first and second laws and the absolute temperature scale. His theoretical interest in electromagnetism became a practical one, when in the 1850s, he served as a consultant on a proposed transatlantic telegraph cable. The eventually successful project was completed in 1858. Queen Victoria knighted Thomson for his role in the project. Later, in1892, she enobled him, and Thomson became known as Lord Kelvin.

09/27/2023

Antimatter feels "positive" gravity, the same as normal matter:

Down goes antimatter! Gravity's effect on matter's elusive twin is revealed National Science Foundation sent this bulletin at 09/27/2023 11:20 AM EDT Subscribe View as a web page Contact Us Down goes antimatter! Gravity's effect on matter's elusive twin is revealed Landmark CERN experiment answers l...

09/21/2023

https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-arts-and-sciences/news/2023/09/astrophysics-aspirations-explores-undergraduate-research-opportunity.php?utm_medium=email&_hsmi=275296047&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--Wxs-MfQQpvqc6b3K0-4Jbru3h5M4wNSEhFzSlT-KbCctyEm3ALPYex-vQ08yuAV3Vc88vMbiuOs2EpkcE_MzT0etFng&utm_content=275296047&utm_source=hs_email

Senior physics major Jaidyn Spoon participated in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program supported by the National Science Foundation.

06/07/2023

Supermassive black holes that weigh several billion times the mass of our sun are present at the centers of active galaxies. Astronomers observe them as bright galactic cores where the galaxy's supermassive black hole devours matter from a violent whirlpool called accretion disk. Some of the matter....

01/09/2023

https://ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/news/astronomers-discover-eight-new-super-hot-stars?fbclid=IwAR2PyXa9ivA3wau9aMaC07K-OxD-dj7pKegVHaLBuimXbfZpK9PAinJO5eo

An international team of astronomers has discovered eight of the hottest stars in the universe, all with surfaces hotter than 100,000 degrees Celsius. The work was p...

11/09/2022

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/?utm_source=thisistrue.com

While world record holders may have memorized more than 70,000 digits of pi, a JPL engineer explains why you really only need a tiny fraction of that for most calculations – even at NASA.

11/07/2022

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200711/physicshistory.cfm?fbclid=IwAR2xjB_O-oy-7DdOAI5xNdzIbMjEZmQaS46YmaR5PUG3wEI-816RAxvzTPI

By the late 1800s, physicists generally believed that light was a wave.

11/04/2022

https://www.cnet.com/science/space/closest-black-hole-to-earth-found-right-in-our-cosmic-backyard/