SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Your close-up is lovely, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Two observatories, two anniversaries, and one spectacular nebula 🌌🎉

One year after NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory's First Look and 36 years into NASA's Hubble Space Telescope mission, we're celebrating together by revisiting the Trifid Nebula as seen by both observatories 🔭

Also known as M20, Trifid is a stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years away in the Milky Way where newborn stars shape the surrounding gas and dust with powerful radiation.

These images show the same object at very different scales.

Rubin's view shows the rich cosmic neighborhood around Trifid, including the Lagoon Nebula and millions of other stars, while Hubble's view reveals the intricate details within the nebula itself.

Together, these observatories can show us both "the forest and the trees," from the broader context of our galaxy to how individual stars shape the gas and dust around them. ✨



📷:
Panels 1+2: NSF–DOE Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA
Panel 3: NASA, ESA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Sibling supernovas 🌟🌟

One of the brightest gamma-ray-emitting supernova remnants, the Jellyfish Nebula, hid evidence of its sister star.

Now using 16 years of data from our Large Area Telescope on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, physicists have uncovered the close relationship of the remains of a second star explosion. Identifying gamma rays associated with the supernova remnant that was previously hidden in the glare of its neighbor, this is the first known observation of a binary system where both stars have undergone supernova explosions.

The two star wrecks are both located in the constellation Gemini, around 6,000 light-years away from Earth. The Jellyfish Nebula is estimated to be 8,000 to 9,000 years old, while its sibling is 20,000 to 110,000 years old. This means the delay between the explosions could have been up to 100,000 years.

Learn more: https://stanford.io/4w4ds8u

Summer solstice ☀️

Enjoy the long shadows cast around one of the world’s longest buildings, right here at SLAC. Today is the longest day of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere)!

Look familiar? 🌉

Our iconic Bay Area bridges make an appearance where you might least expect them. Inside one of the world’s longest buildings, these miniature landmarks bridge the gaps between the laser table and the beamline for our powerful X-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source.

The mock Golden Gate Bridge was at home in our X-ray Pump Probe (XPP) experimental hutch before its latest upgrade, while the mock “Bay Bridge” is still in use at our X-ray Correlation Spectroscopy (XCS) instrument. These uniquely designed laser transport tubes minimize air currents while also serving as a visual and physical barrier between scientists and the laser beam. Truth be told, these bridges transport laser beams a whole lot faster than your car during rush hour.

In the room where it happened...

This is End Station A where Jerome Friedman, Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor did a series of experiments that led to the discovery of elementary particles now known as quarks, in 1967.

Subsequent experiments on polarized electron scattering, led by Charles Prescott, firmly established the existence of “Neutral Currents” that are especially important in neutrino scattering. These experiments contributed to a better understanding of the electroweak structure of the then-developing Standard Model and much, much more! Learn more about neutrino research at SLAC: https://stanford.io/4efyr2g

SLAC data 🤝 Genesis Mission

We are home to two of the biggest scientific data sets on the planet. Our powerful LCLS X-ray laser and the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s central data hub will collect data at speeds and volumes that humans cannot process in real time.

Alongside other national laboratories, universities and industry leaders across the country, SLAC researchers are now innovating AI tools to address the entire discovery pipeline, turning data into insights by connecting the instruments to computing across the national lab complex.

This is one of SLAC’s major parts to play in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission goal of building a singular discovery platform to enable faster breakthroughs and solve problems at a national scale, transforming the way America does science and engineering to double productivity and impact within a decade: https://stanford.io/4veFPRp

we’re building the AI-powered lab.

You can hear all about it from the latest , fully recorded and now on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/live/Oepxd27_5JE?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=public-lecture

Public Lecture | How scientists are building the AI-powered laboratory presented by Sean Gasiorowski How do we find the next super material? How do we discover the next...

What started as a “hail mary” method turned into “nearly perfect” beam conditions.

Tuning the beam from our accelerator to End Station A has earned the LDMX/LESA team SLAC’s highest honor – a 2025 Director’s Award. They are enabling new science by delivering extremely low-current electron beams to support future experiments which are designed to explore regions of dark matter that other facilities can’t easily reach.

This coordinated effort across multiple SLAC directorates and alongside collaborators from institutions around the world achieved what no one team could accomplish alone.

Good to meet last week with John Sarrao, director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, to discuss SLAC's ongoing work in areas including AI, quantum research, and fusion energy. Federal investments in these fields are critical to America’s scientific leadership.