Gustavo Burdman is first
Ben Lee Fellow

Gustavo Burdman

Gustavo Burdman shares many of the interests of the late esteemed theorist Ben Lee. Burdman will get a chance to further explore those interests as the first Ben Lee Fellow.

Burdman, a professor at the Physics Institute of the University of San Paulo who also holds a Guggenheim Fellowship, expects to work mainly on two issues at Fermilab: the origin of the masses of elementary particles and the nature of dark matter.

"I'm very excited about having Gustavo here," said Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim, who helped to establish the fellowship for senior theorists, building on the Fermilab Frontier Fellowship.

Burdman started his career here as a post-doc in 1994; it's also where he met his wife, astrophysicist Ivone Albuquerque. She will work on dark matter issues at Fermilab and the Pierre Auger cosmic ray project.

Burdman looks forward to working with Fermilab's large group of theorists and expects to work closely with experimentalists. That environment owes much to the example set by Lee, who helped to bridge theory and experiment at the laboratory.

Fermilab theoretical physicist Chris Quigg, who followed Lee to Fermilab, said that "Lee has powerful gifts in all dimensions."

Lee compared his work to solving a jigsaw puzzle. He once told a group of science writers: "At moments of despair and frustration, I feel as though somebody has scrambled two boxes of jigsaw puzzles for me to put together. But I believe in what Einstein said: 'God is subtle but he is not malicious.'"

-- Kristine Crane

Luty named second
theorist-of-the-week

Markus Luty, (right) a theorist from UC Davis, works with DZero experimentor Oleksiy Atramentov. Luty is the second LPC theorist-of-the-week. He will hold office hours Wednesday from 4-5 p.m. and Thursday from 10 a.m. - noon in Fermilab's LHC Physics Center on the 11th floor crossover. Luty will also give a series of talks this week. The theorist-of-the-week program aims to foster interactions between theorists and experimentalists at Fermilab.

How do you weigh the Milky Way?

From New Scientist, Jan. 20, 2009

Earlier this month, astronomers announced a new measurement of the Milky Way's mass - saying it is 50 percent heftier than thought and about as heavy as our nearest large neighbour, Andromeda.

The new result is a major revision and a full three times larger than another team's recent estimate. It also raises a question: why don't astronomers know how much our home galaxy weighs?

Astronomers have attempted to measure the mass of the Milky Way since the 1920s. But the measurement turns out to be exceedingly tricky, not least because some 90 percent of the galaxy's mass is thought to be made of dark matter - a mysterious, invisible substance that only reveals its presence by its gravitational tugs on stars and gas clouds.

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Fast-spinning stars get new image

From MSNBC, Jan. 20, 2009

With launch of Fermi telescope, scientists getting glimpse of pulsars

Since their discovery 40 years ago, pulsars ­- the rapidly spinning, highly magnetized crushed cores of exploded stars - have largely been detected via the pulsing radio signals emitted by their lighthouse beam-like jets. But astronomers have suspected that these pulses give only the slightest hint of the true power of these cosmic dynamos.

With the launch of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly GLAST) in June of last year, scientists are finally getting a glimpse of the powerful hearts of these stellar beasts. In its first four months of operation, Fermi detected more than three dozen pulsars, 12 of which are new gamma-ray-only pulsars.

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