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JILA Fellow Adjoint and the University of Colorado Boulder professor Dr. Jeffrey Linksy has been selected as a Fellow for the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Linksy was cited for "decades of innovative studies of the heliosphere and the local interstellar medium; for his models of stellar chromospheres, for productive observing programs on multiple satellites and for establishing the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio in the local disk, among other scientific contributions, and for his decades of service to the astronomical community.” At JILA, Linksy's research involves the analysis of high-resolution stellar spectra, primarily in the ultraviolet, to measure the physical properties of stars, the atmospheres of exoplanets, gas in the local interstellar medium, and the abundance of deuterium in the Galaxy. Congratulations Dr. Linksy!

Sitting 150 million kilometers away from the Earth, the Sun produces puzzling phenomena, like solar flares, that physicists are working to understand. One of these puzzles involves the Sun's tachocline, a belt of heat transition. Before leaving JILA to become a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz, Matilsky collaborated with JILA Fellow Juri Toomre and his group at JILA to study the Sun's tachocline using computer simulations.

When it comes to inspiring young people to pursue a career within the sciences, you can't start too early. At least, that's what the JILA Excellence in Diversity and Inclusivity (JEDI) group believed when they collaborated with the Colorado non-profit organization Pretty Brainy to develop a speaker series. The series, designed for girls from ages 11 and up, featured the voices of several women JILAns, all focusing on their work and giving tools for success to this younger generation. Over the course of 8 weeks, women of all ages could virtually tune in to hear some of the brightest female minds from JILA discuss the importance of mentorship, perseverance, failure, and of course, some of the newest findings within physics.

This year, JILA celebrates its 60th anniversary. Officially established on April 13, 1962, as a joint institution between the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), JILA has become a world leader in physics research. Its rich history includes three Nobel laureates, groundbreaking work in laser development, atomic clocks, underlying dedication to precision measurement, and even competitive sports leagues. The process of creating this science goliath was not always straightforward and took the dedication and hard work of many individuals.

Two JILA graduate students were awarded this year's Richard Nelson Thomas Award for Graduate Students in Astrophyiscs. This award is given annually in honor of Dr. Richard Nelson Thomas, a founding member of JILA and an astrophysics researcher. Dr. Thomas was instrumental in establishing JILA's Visiting Fellows program, as well as growing the institution as a whole. Because of Dr. Thomas' legacy, his family and friends established an annual award given to an outstanding graduate student in astrophysics.

In a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, Bice and Toomre have found a link between a red dwarf's convective cycles, or the heat cycles in a star’s atmosphere, and its magnetic fields, using fluid dynamics simulations.

An international team of astrophysicists, including scientists from ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������, may have pinpointed the cause of that shift. The magnetic field lines threading through the black hole appear to have flipped upside down, causing a rapid but short-lived change in the object’s properties. It was as if compasses on Earth suddenly started pointing south instead of north. The findings, published May 5 in The Astrophysical Journal, could change how scientists look at supermassive black holes, said study coauthor Nicolas Scepi.

When two galaxies collide, the supermassive black holes at their cores release a devastating gravitational “kick,” similar to the recoil from a shotgun. New research led by ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������ suggests that this kick may be so powerful it can knock millions of stars into wonky orbits. The research, published Oct. 29 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, helps solve a decades-old mystery surrounding a strangely-shaped cluster of stars at the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy. It might also help researchers better understand the process of how galaxies grow by feeding on each other.

Former JILA Fellow Richard "Dick" McCray passed away on October 26, 2021.  From another JILA Fellow said that: “Dick was a giant in JILA… All those who knew him loved him dearly."  Richard (Dick) McCray came to Colorado to work at JILA in 1971 until his retirement in 2004.  Dick also served as JILA Chair in 1981 and 1982.  Dick was a Distinguished Professor of Astrophysics at ���Ҵ�ý�ƽ������, a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1989, a Guggenheim Fellow in 1975-76 and recipient of the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics in 1990. Dick’s area of research was theoretical astrophysics, including the physics of interstellar gas, Active Galactic Nuclei, binary X-ray systems, and supernova explosion; observing these systems with spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Chandra X-ray telescope. You can read more about his work here, as well as an oral history via personal interview.

In 2019, a team of researchers used an international network of radio telescopes—called the Event Horizon Telescope—to take the first photo of a supermassive black hole in the center of the elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87). On that team of researchers was JILA Fellow Jason Dexter. Since then, Dexter has been studying M87's black hole further using simulations, with code written by researchers at the University of Illinois. As described in a new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), Dexter, and his team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, collaborated with researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Illinois to create a new simulation studying the edge of a black hole.