![]() This was the most productive I’ve ever been in my life.” Tefera notes that “we got massive monitors, and everything was essentially supplied to us. Working at the Flatiron Institute has given the Pomona students a first-hand look at how high-level science is done. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel as much.” “There are many libraries that have been created by users that are publicly available,” he says. Research of this nature requires high-performance computing, so Moreno is helping the students learn to code in Python, which is heavily used in astrophysics. Looking at the halos around galaxies, which is what the students are doing, will tell you something about how those galaxies formed and what those stars came from.” For example, “a massive galaxy like the Milky Way used to be a lot of tiny galaxies that merged together. “When I look at galaxies and their structure, it can tell me something about their family history, their interaction history,” says Moreno. The team used a tool called FIREbox to simulate galaxies being close together to model the gravitational attraction between them and study the characteristics of the resulting tails. Tefera explains that gravity from the larger galaxy pulls matter out from these smaller ones. When tiny galaxies are orbiting massive ones, they also get disrupted.” “If you think of a comet going around the sun, its gravitational pull disrupts the comet and it develops a tail,” Moreno says. The three are studying the properties of stellar haloes, tidal tails and streams around simulated galaxies. Khadi Diallo ’25 is a geology major from Ontario, California. Anbo Li ’26, from Maryland, is exploring possible majors. Gada Tefera ’26 is a computer science major from Minnesota. Moreno brought three students with him for the two-week residency at the Institute in May. In addition to conducting research with his students, Moreno will organize a conference on galaxy evolution to be held in 2024, preceded by a workshop on incorporating diversity, equity and inclusion principles in mentoring. The Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Advocacy (IDEA) Scholar Program invites distinguished scientists to do residencies at the institute as part of its commitment to increasing diversity and inclusion in science. Moreno was named a 2023-24 IDEA scholar by the institute. Moreno’s research is funded by the Simons and Hirsch foundations. The center is one of the world’s largest research hubs in the field. A number of them have been adopted as the official course textbook and that’s a trend that will hopefully continue to increase in popularity.Three Pomona College students did research this summer in the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City, thanks to the efforts of Jorge Moreno, assistant professor of physics and astronomy. It is my sincere hope that students can utilize these free online physics textbooks as supplemental materials to aid in their understanding of the topics they are studying. The Free Textbook List will include only those materials labeled as textbooks by their authors. ![]() ![]() Inventions stemming from the study of physics surround us – transistors, computers, the Internet, televisions, MRI machines, X-Rays and so very much more. ![]() Sir Isaac Newton, considered by some to be the most influential scientist in the field, invented the calculus needed to calculate the gravitational force of the Earth on the Moon. As a field of study, physics is a subject that often requires knowledge in other fields of study including biophysics and quantum chemistry. ![]() With such a broad spectrum of physical systems to study, physics is broken down further into a number of sub-specialties. Physics has been defined in a number of ways but once of the most succinct is that physics endeavors to explain how the universe behaves through the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, energy and force. ![]()
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