Dallas Morning News Originally Posted: June 13, 2021 One of my favorite quotes about science comes not from a practicing scientist but from a comedian, Dara O’Briain. He brilliantly summarized the whole point of science and how it makes progress: “Science knows it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would just stop.” Physicists, those scientists who study energy, matter, space and time, have just discovered a vast gap in their knowledge thanks to the unpredictable behavior of the tiniest-of-tiny particles, the muon. And if history is repeated, the new generation of physicists will discover pathbreaking ideas that could lead to revolutionary technology. Like all science, physics advances because scientists come to know what they don’t know. A great example of this happened at the end of [...]

SMU News Originally Posted: May 18, 2021 DALLAS (SMU) – Krista Lynne Smith, an assistant professor of physics at SMU, has received a grant from NASA to study one of the most extreme objects in the universe – Active Galactic Nuclei. These objects, called AGN for short, are galaxies with a central supermassive black hole feeding on gas from what’s called an accretion disk. The two-year grant of $215,000 will allow Smith to analyze data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to answer a variety of questions about Active Galactic Nuclei and the gas that fuels them. Learning more about these extreme objects could shed light on the behavior of matter in the deeply warped spacetime around black holes and the processes by which black holes emit powerful jets into their host galaxies. TESS is [...]