Assistant Professor of Teaching Claudine Moreau recently led the Physics & Astro Tea audience in a creative writing exercise based on an image of the Butterfly Nebula and the prompt, “The object is not [blank]; it is [blank]”.

This is one of several prompts and techniques Moreau used while writing “Life After the Eruption,: a collection of poetry inspired by her sabbatical travels to Scotland and Iceland. In this collection, she explores how the self can regrow after its own eruptions using rocks and the cosmos to think about rebuilding.

Hosted weekly by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Physics & Astro Tea promises engaging discussions, thought-provoking ideas and a delightful spread of refreshments. Open to all students, faculty and staff, this gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow physics aficionados in a relaxed and informal setting. Meetings take place in the third-floor lounge of Innovation Hall at 3:20 p.m. on Wednesdays.

Parker Stevens worked for MegaWatt Lasers, a company based in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, which designs and manufactures solid state lasers. These laser systems often find use in medical, industrial and military applications. One of Parker’s tasks was to develop a new safety system and signage for the research lab that could be controlled remotely.

Ja’Mir Parham spent his summer at a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (NSF-REU) site at the SETI Institute, an organization whose primary mission is to explore life in the universe. Ja’Mir focused on finding large, hydrogen-rich regions of the Milky Way Galaxy that could be star-forming regions. His team identified 15 new candidate regions, a significant increase in the number of previously identified regions.

Jonathan Berkson spent his summer at an NSF-REU at Washington State University, where his work centered on observational data related to dwarf galaxies and intermediate black holes. Jonathan and his mentors are continuing to work on a paper based on his efforts this summer.

Hosted weekly by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Physics & Astro Tea promises engaging discussions, thought-provoking ideas and a delightful spread of refreshments. Open to all students, faculty and staff, this gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow physics aficionados in a relaxed and informal setting. Meetings take place in the third-floor lounge of Innovation Hall at 3:20 p.m. on Wednesdays.

JWST has a wide-field slitless spectroscopy mode, which allows astronomers to measure the chemical composition, motion, and redshift of large numbers of galaxies simultaneously. By measuring the redshift of spectral lines, astronomers can determine how far away a galaxy is and therefore how long ago its light was emitted. Bordoloi and his collaborators have used this information to show that the spaces surrounding early galaxies is metal-rich, indicating that chemical evolution occurred early in the history of the universe.

Hosted weekly by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Physics & Astro Tea promises engaging discussions, thought-provoking ideas and a delightful spread of refreshments. Open to all students, faculty and staff, this gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow physics aficionados in a relaxed and informal setting. Meetings take place in the third-floor lounge of Innovation Hall at 3:20 p.m. on Wednesdays.

Students Manuel Anyimah ’26, Rahv Tupac-Yupanqui ’26 and Haolin Wang ’26 will graduate with degrees in physics; Morgan Micharski with a degree in Astrophysics; and  Carissa Trollinger with a degree in Astronomy.

Jonathan Berkson, Jaylem Cheek, Morgan Micharski, Matthew Reick, Muhammed Tahiru, and Myka Thomas were inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma.

Awards were given to Iris Blanton-Parke ’29 and Priyal Sanathara ’29 for outstanding work as first-years in astrophysics. Danny Asnis ’29 and James Engelbrecht ’29 were recognized for outstanding work in first-year physics. Colin Vernon earned the award for outstanding teaching assistant of the year, and Jonathan Berkson earned the award for outstanding research.

Similar low-impact approaches are used in ice flow and climate research, including remote sensing, photography, and observational fieldwork of ice flows and glacier dynamics.

Hosted weekly by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Physics & Astro Tea promises engaging discussions, thought-provoking ideas and a delightful spread of refreshments. Open to all students, faculty and staff, this gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow physics aficionados in a relaxed and informal setting. Meetings take place in the third-floor lounge of Innovation Hall at 3:20 p.m. on Wednesdays.

In a recent talk at the Physics and Astro Tea, Cárdenas-Avendaño shared the historical development of this problem, starting with Isaac Newton’s deterministic laws of motion and moving through the n-body problem, a generalized question about the long-term motions of gravitationally attracted objects. This problem famously has no analytical solution and must be done computationally.

So is the solar system stable? Will any planets suddenly be ejected? The best current answer is maybe, but not during our lifetime.

Hosted weekly by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Physics & Astro Tea promises engaging discussions, thought-provoking ideas and a delightful spread of refreshments. Open to all students, faculty and staff, this gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow physics aficionados in a relaxed and informal setting. Meetings take place in the third-floor lounge of Innovation Hall at 3:20 p.m. on Wednesdays.

Squire is currently a threat intelligence researcher for F-Secure, a Finnish company specializing in cyber security and privacy. Under the theme of “everything is always changing all the time”, Squire said that in her workplace, AI tools are not optional; they are a “power up” that can increase individual productivity several times over.

However, those “AI tools are kinda problematic and also kinda good”, and there is a lot of gray area of what is ethical or even authentic. Squire encouraged students to find ways to protect themselves, their identities, and their value as they graduate and enter the job market.

Hosted weekly by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Physics & Astro Tea promises engaging discussions, thought-provoking ideas and a delightful spread of refreshments. Open to all students, faculty and staff, this gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow physics aficionados in a relaxed and informal setting. Meetings take place in the third-floor lounge of Innovation Hall at 3:20 p.m. on Wednesdays.

Associate Professor of Physics Martin Kamela spoke to a Physics & Astro Tea audience about the singing, whistling, squeaking and barking sounds that some sands can make. Researchers have found that, in order to make these sounds, sand granules need to be nearly spherical, small, and nearly uniform in size. These sounds seem to come from the friction between granules arranged in slip planes and are unrelated to other surface effects.

But sound is not the only trip up sand’s sleeve. Like some other granular materials, the empty volume between granules of sand will expand under shear deformation, explaining why sand seems to dry out when it is stepped on.

Hosted weekly by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Physics & Astro Tea promises engaging discussions, thought-provoking ideas and a delightful spread of refreshments. Open to all students, faculty and staff, this gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow physics aficionados in a relaxed and informal setting. Meetings take place in the third-floor lounge of Innovation Hall at 3:20 p.m. on Wednesdays.

In a panel discussion led by Professor of Astrophysics Tony Crider, Associate Professor of Astrophysics Chris Richardson, Morgan Micharski, Cayden Tirak and Jonathan Berkson shared reflections from their time at the national conference. Discussion topics ranged from announcements of cutting-edge research, the tenor of academics and researchers under the current state of science funding and policies, and the experience of presenting scholarly work on a national stage.

Hosted weekly by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Physics & Astro Tea promises engaging discussions, thought-provoking ideas and a delightful spread of refreshments. Open to all students, faculty and staff, this gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow physics aficionados in a relaxed and informal setting. Meetings take place in the third-floor lounge of Innovation Hall at 3:20 p.m. on Wednesdays.

Hosted weekly by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Physics & Astro Tea promises engaging discussions, thought-provoking ideas and a delightful spread of refreshments. Open to all students, faculty and staff, this gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with fellow physics aficionados in a relaxed and informal setting. Meetings take place in the third-floor lounge of Innovation Hall at 3:20 p.m. on Wednesdays.

Basu Zych became interested in astronomy at a young age at went to the University of California at Berkeley, but found herself burned out by the time she graduated. She spent time working at a telecommunications company before finding a job as a docent at a science museum. While at the museum, she was motivated to study for the physics subject GRE and apply to graduate school at Columbia University, where she graduated in 2009.

Basu-Zych left graduate school for a three-year post-doctoral position at NASA and another four-year stint on soft money, a type of external-grant funded position. Basu-Zych currently has a joint appointment with NASA-Goddard and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, primarily working on multi-wavelength studies of starburst galaxies over the history of the universe. She collaborates with Associate Professor of Physics Chris Richardson and was able to spend several days at Elon in late October meeting with classes and research students.