Prof. Nagamine and Prof. Proga attended the Kavli IPMU Focus Week Workshop on HYPER-ACCRETION

Prof. Nagamine and Prof. Proga attended the Kavli IPMU Focus Week Workshop on HYPER-ACCRETION during April 7-11 in Kashiwa, Japan.

Accretion, at rates substantially in excess of the Eddington limit, is implicated in tidal disruption events, gamma-ray bursts, some X-ray binaries and supermassive black hole formation. Despite this ubiquity, the physical principles that govern hyper-accretion remain to be determined. Recent advances in numerical radiation hydrodynamics, along with observations of the time-dependence of hyper-accreting flows following tidal disruptions, offer new opportunities to make progress. The workshop is intended to facilitate interaction between observers and theorists working on hyper-accretion in different astrophysical systems, and to identify new directions for future research.

A new faculty member will soon join the Astronomy group!

The Physics and Astronomy department conducted an extensive faculty search and received over 100 applications for this tenure-track position. We are happy and excited to announce that Dr. Rebecca Martin will join the department next year. Dr. Martin earned her PhD with Professor Jim Pringle in Cambridge and was subsequently a research fellow at both STSI in Baltimore and JILA in Colorado. She is an expert in accretion theory applied to proto-planetary systems, and will have much to bring to UNLV.

Prof. Bing Zhang coauthors a paper in Nature Physics.

A paper by Z. Lucas Uhm and Prof. Bing Zhang, entitled "Fast cooling synchrotron radiation in a decaying magnetic field and gamma-ray burst emission mechanism", is published in Nature Physics. In this paper, the authors make a breakthrough in understanding the radiation mechanism of GRBs, which has been a subject of debate for years. The link of the paper can be found here.