UA Science

Richard Poss

Astronomy's Dr. Richard Poss Wins Humanities Award

On Friday November 8, Dr. Richard Poss of the Astronomy Department received one of the Ted and Shirley Taubeneck Superior Teaching Awards. These are awarded by UArizona's Humanities Seminars Program. Richard was recognized for "Sense of Wonder: Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction."  Other awardees were Prof Ted Bucholz: "The Cello,"  Prof Greg Sakall: "Controversial Issues in the Supreme Court," and Prof Steve Smith: "Water and Society: Sustainable Use of the Essential Resource for Life."

Larger versions of the photos making up the cover photo can be seen ...

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Testing Dark Matter by Looking for the Large Magellanic Cloud's Effect on the Milky Way

A recent research paper by grad student Nicolas Garavito-Camargo, professor Gurtina Besla, and collaborators has been picked up by AAS Nova. In it, they explore the effects of the gravitational interaction between the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Milky Way.

The following is a brief summary of the research:

The interaction between the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud provides a unique opportunity to test for the existence of dark matter. As a recently accreted, massive dwarf galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud induced a dark matter wake in the stellar and dark matter particles of the Milky Way halo. This article presents a suite of 8 high-resolution N-body simulations of the interaction between the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud to analyze the properties of the wake. These simulations show that the dark matter wake has a...

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