Thursday (Jan. 28) during a Hubble Hangout, University of Notre Dame astrophysicist will discuss a new study about high velocity clouds around the Milky Way Galaxy that were jettisoned and are falling back in.

The , titled “Monstrous Cloud Boomerangs Back Into Our Galaxy,” will take place at 3 p.m. EST Thursday. Hubble Hangouts are designed to engage everyone involved in astronomy research and outreach. Participants can .

Further details on this study, including images and the press release, will be available at 3 p.m. Thursday on and .

Contact: Nicolas Lehner, 574-631-5755, nlehner@nd.edu

On Tuesday (Jan. 19), the U.S. Supreme Court announced its intention to decide the fate of President Barack Obama’s immigration reform plan before the 2016 presidential election. The president’s plan to allow millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. to apply for programs that could allow them to extend their stay has received notable partisan backlash. The case, known as United States v. Texas, has also raised the issue of the legailty of the president’s executive actions. Luis Fraga, professor of Transformative Latino Leadership and co-director of the at the University of Notre Dame and an expert on the politics of immigration, Latinos and American politics, says reform is necessary, but could limit executive power.

“Because one of the central issues is about the limits to executive authority, it is likely that the Court will split between the four most conservative Republicans and the four most liberal justices. That again places Justice Anthony Kennedy, who most often votes with the conservative group, but on occasion does not, in the position of being the person who will decide national policy.

“The primary issue to the Obama administration is how it can legally maneuver around a Republican wall of opponents to immigration reform in both the House and the Senate. It is the members who constitute this wall who prevent any vote being taken on legislation to reform our immigration system. There is considerable bipartisan consensus that some type of reform is necessary. Given the Republican leadership’s unwillingness to allow a vote, the president used his executive authority to provide temporary protection from deportation to undocumented parents with children who are U.S. citizens by birth. This would provide this special protected status to an estimated 5 million parents of U.S. citizen children.

“The risk the Obama administration takes in appealing the case to the Supreme Court is that it might support the decisions of the lower courts to limit the president’s authority. If that were to happen, this would be a significant limitation on the president’s executive power with implications for other areas of public policy.”

Contact: Luis Fraga, 574-631-4742, luis.fraga@nd.edu

Private school voucher programs are becoming more common, with more than a million U.S. families participating in these programs across the country. These programs are designed to provide more options for students and their parents — the option of attending the school of the student’s choice.

But as these vouchers gain popularity and the financial implications become more complicated, one question remains: Does the money spent by these programs ultimately go to poor families, wealthy families whose children would have attended private schools anyway, or to the schools’ bottom lines?

A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “,” authored by Daniel Hungerman, associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, and graduate student , provides the first study of how school choice programs affect the finances of private schools and the affordability of a private education.

The study, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, used a largely overlooked set of data — nonprofit tax returns filed by private schools. Combining this data with information on school laws, Hungerman and Rinz conducted a statistical analysis.

The bottom line? 91��Ƶ choice programs raise a lot of money for schools. In fact, in the states studied in the NBER working paper, which studied approximately 20 percent of all U.S. private school enrollment, hundreds of millions of dollars were raised through the voucher programs.

“We find that subsidy programs created a large transfer of public funding to private schools, suggesting that every dollar of funding increased revenue by a dollar or more,” says Hungerman.

But the way a program is crafted matters. For example, some programs are available only for disabled or low-income students.

“Programs restricting eligibility to certain groups of students increase enrollment in private schools, but do not significantly raise the cost of private schools,” says Hungerman. “On the other hand, programs without any restrictions see no change in enrollment, and yet these private schools still increase their tuition when the voucher is introduced.”

The paper also calculates elasticities of demand and supply for private schools, and discusses welfare effects. The full study is available on the .

Contact: Daniel Hungerman, 574-631-4495, dhungerm@nd.edu

, an astrophysicist and the Frank M. Freimann Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame, will participate in a Congressional briefing on Wednesday (June 24) about the potential of science to change the world in the not-too-distant future.

The briefing was organized by the Science Coalition, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of more than 60 of the nation’s leading public and private research universities that is dedicated to sustaining the federal government’s investment in basic scientific research and protecting America’s preeminence in research innovation.

At the congressional briefing, Crepp will discuss his predictions for what space discovery will be like in 2034, focusing on one major piece of equipment that will provide a leap forward in galactic understanding and discovery — an eight-meter telescope equipped with an advanced starlight suppression system called the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF).

“By 2034 I believe that NASA will have the TPF in space, directly imaging planets that are 10 billion times fainter than their parent stars,” Crepp says in a . “This enormous leap beyond 2014 capabilities will allow scientists to meaningfully search for the ‘biomarkers’ that will distinguish life-sustaining planets from the rest.”

Crepp, co-discoverer of more than 80 extrasolar planets, is currently building a precision spectrometer that will detect Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zone of the closest and lowest-mass stars in the galaxy: the M-dwarfs. Crepp’s work has been supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation, and he is a recipient of a 2013 NASA Early Career Award.

As a member of the Science Coalition, the University of Notre Dame joins the nation’s top research universities in a common objective to educate policymakers on the important role the federal government plays in furthering each university’s research mission of developing innovative, cutting-edge solutions to some of the world’s most complex challenges.

Contact: Justin Crepp, jcrepp@nd.edu

A recent donation to the University of Notre Dame’s Airborne Aero-Optics Laboratory (AAOL) is about to give laser-directed energy and free-space communication a transonic boost: researching at the speed of sound.

A Falcon 10 aircraft, donated by Philadelphia-area businessman Matthew McDevitt, will enable the University to continue its groundbreaking aerospace research and development that will advance technology for weapons systems and communications. The results could pave the way to high-field-of-regard, point-to-point airborne laser propagation for directed energy and communications as fast and robust as fiber-optic Internet connectivity. In other words, high-flying research at Notre Dame is not only helping to refine the U.S.’s weapons systems, but it could lead to a television show streaming just as fast on a commercial flight as it does in a living room.

Since the mid-1990s, aerospace engineering research has found its home at Notre Dame through the Aero-Optics Group, directed by , professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering. With support from the High Energy Laser-Joint Technology Office (HEL-JTO), Notre Dame faculty and researchers have been working with the Air Force Institute of Technology’s (CDE) and to conduct studies focused on directed energy, specifically laser interactions with turbulence, or aero-optics.

The AAOL — one of the research programs within the Aero-Optics Group — has taken the lasers to the skies, studying the effects of turbulence on a laser directed from one aircraft to a turret installed on a tandem-flying aircraft about 50 meters away flying at transonic speeds.

“Planes have difficulty using lasers because even a tiny amount of turbulence can effectively turn a laser into a really expensive flashlight,” said Jumper. “Supported by funding from the HEL-JTO, we have developed aero-optic wave front beam-control architectures that overcome aircraft vibration and mitigate the effects of turbulence, which could enable such technologies as free-space communication.”

Beyond the obvious improvements to directed energy applications, the research will also lead to more than just in-flight streaming entertainment for bored airplane passengers. If brought to market, point-to-point airborne laser communications could improve transmissions between aircraft systems and other aircraft, satellites or ground stations and create a foundation for video feeds from unmanned flights over battlefields or disaster areas.

AAOL’s research has been conducted in wind tunnel labs on Notre Dame’s campus to simulate flight conditions, and in 2010 the team successfully completed laser-based testing in-flight on two leased Cessna Citations outfitted as sophisticated airborne aero-optics laboratories. The following series of in-flight tests helped ensure the performance of the aero-optic system developed at the University, but testing was required at higher Mach speeds — and the need for a Falcon 10 arose.

“To really continue our research, we needed to realize higher levels than we could achieve in wind tunnel studies and with previous aircraft,” said Jumper. “With a Falcon 10, we can conduct research at Mach numbers above Mach 0.8, providing an authentic environment that produces more accurate results than a simulated set-up.”

Growing up in a Catholic family and attending 12 years of Catholic school, McDevitt, who previously owned the aircraft for private use with his family, learned about the University’s need for a fast-flying jet and generously donated the aircraft. Since the donation, the Falcon 10 has been transformed into a high-speed, high-altitude flying lab, outfitted with the laser-tracking turret and additional aero-optic technology. And, with an engine protection program donated from longtime Notre Dame research partner and South Bend neighbor , the Falcon 10’s engines will be maintained at no cost to the University for six years.

“This dedicated plane allows the AAOL team to set up, troubleshoot and conduct complex experiments, which was not available when we leased aircraft one week at a time,” said Jumper. “This is about a $1.25 million gift, and without it we would certainly have a less robust program.”

During a recent visit to Notre Dame, McDevitt got a first-hand look at the aircraft since it was converted to a state-of-the-art component of AAOL’s aerospace research. To see a video with an inside look at how Jumper and his team are taking laser-directed energy to the skies with the Falcon 10 flying research lab, .