Recent ucsc_astro_oapolicydeposits items

Climate Action in Higher Education: Roadmap

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The climate crisis and its attendant difficulties present more challenges than any single government, institution or individual can fix. From one perspective, universities and campus-community members have responded actively, creating new schools and centers, refocusing research, and doing their best to tackle the challenges of a warming world. More practically, however, current efforts are often a siloed mosaic of individual strategies. Time is of the essence – we must face the reality of almost certainly exceeding a 1.5° global temperature rise and potentially a 2.0° rise, if not more. This paper is a call for a more comprehensive, strategic, and coordinated response to the threat of climate change. This white paper presents a bird's-eye view of how a campus’s many components – administrators, faculty, staff, students, academic departments, interdisciplinary groups, operations units, and outreach services – can work together. Compiling the perspectives of United States and Canadian...

The Magnificent Five Images of Supernova Refsdal: Time Delay and Magnification Measurements

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In late 2014, four images of supernova (SN) “Refsdal,” the first known example of a strongly lensed SN with multiple resolved images, were detected in the MACS J1149 galaxy-cluster field. Following the images’ discovery, the SN was predicted to reappear within hundreds of days at a new position ∼8″ away in the field. The observed reappearance in late 2015 makes it possible to carry out Refsdal’s original proposal to use a multiply imaged SN to measure the Hubble constant H 0, since the time delay between appearances should vary inversely with H 0. Moreover, the position, brightness, and timing of the reappearance enable a novel test of the blind predictions of galaxy-cluster models, which are typically constrained only by the positions of multiply imaged galaxies. We have developed a new photometry pipeline that uses DOLPHOT to measure the fluxes of the five images of SN Refsdal from difference images. We apply four separate techniques to perform a blind measurement of the relative...

Cultural violence in news coverage of the George Floyd murder: Exploring media depictions of police brutality toward Black‐Americans

Mon, 2 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Abstract The 2020 killing of George Floyd by officer Derek Chauvin sparked one of the largest protest movements in the United States. Chauvin was ultimately convicted of murder—a rare but necessary step to police officer accountability for wrongdoing. The media play an important role in framing the public's attitudes surrounding high‐profile cases involving police killings of unarmed civilians. The current study investigates media narratives surrounding the Floyd case for evidence of cultural violence, which occurs when direct, physical violence becomes institutionalized, accepted as normative, and legitimized. We looked for evidence of cultural violence across 300 articles from three U.S. newspapers (i.e., New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Star Tribune). We coded for cultural violence themes, which we operationalized as the seven mechanisms of moral disengagement, that is, the process of convincing oneself that ethical standards do not apply. Cultural violence was...

Rethinking Thorne–Żytkow Object Formation: The Fate of X-Ray Binary LMC X-4 and Implications for Ultra-long Gamma-Ray Bursts