NICER / ISS Science Nugget
for April 23, 2020

Significant NICER presence at recent virtual physics meeting

Earlier this week, the American Physical Society (APS) held its annual April Meeting; for the first time, it was an online-only "virtual" meeting, due to the COVID-19 situation. The entire program is available to view at https://aps-april.onlineeventpro.freeman.com/.

During the meeting, there were several talks by NICER Science Team members and scientists from the general community presenting NICER results. There was a special session on NICER's neutron star mass and radius measurements that were released in December. This session was widely attended and covered the key results and implications of NICER's PSR J0030+0451 papers (e.g., see figure). The special session included talks by two NICER Science Team members as well as a nuclear theorist who put NICER's result in context with models on ultradense matter.

A separate 30-min plenary talk providing an overview of the NICER mission, in the "Multi-Messenger Probes of Fundamental Physics" session on Monday morning, was attended by more than 530 people.