Kimm Fesenmaier

Articles from Kimm

Super-Earths May be the Most Common Kind of Exoplanet in the Galaxy

"If you have a coin and flip it just once, what does that tell you about the odds of heads versus tails?" asks Heather Knutson, assistant professor of planetary science at Caltech. "It tells you almost nothing. It's the same with planetary systems," she says.

16 Oct 2014

Pulsating Dead Star Beams Energy of 10 Million Suns

Astronomers working with NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), led by Caltech's Fiona Harrison, have found a pulsating dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. The object, previously thought to be a black hole because it is so powerful, is in fact a pulsar—the incredibly dense rotating remains of a star.

9 Oct 2014

Miniature Silicon System Produces Light With Fewer Quantum Fluctuations

One of the many counterintuitive and bizarre insights of quantum mechanics is that even in a vacuum—what many of us think of as an empty void—all is not completely still. Low levels of noise, known as quantum fluctuations, are always present. Always, that is, unless you can pull off a quantum trick. And that's just what a team led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has done.

9 Aug 2013

Caltech Scientists Use Laser Light to Cool Object to Quantum Ground State

For the first time, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in collaboration with a team from the University of Vienna, have managed to cool a miniature mechanical object to its lowest possible energy state using laser light.

5 Oct 2011