Congratulations to graduate student Prabal Saxena for accepting a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellowship at Goddard Space Flight Center.

### 2015 End of Year Student Award Recipients

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2015 Student Awards.

### Student Paper: Signatures of Tidally Distorted Solid Exoplanets

Our work examines the detectability of tidally distorted solid exoplanets in synchronous rotation. Previous work has shown that tidally distorted shapes of close-in gas giants can give rise to radius underestimates and subsequently density overestimates for those planets.

### Student Paper: Removal of pseudo-convergence in coplanar and near-coplanar Riemann problems of ideal magnetohydrodynamics solved using finite volume schemes

Numerical schemes for ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) that are based on the standard finite volume method (FVM) exhibit pseudo-convergence in which irregular structures no longer exist only after heavy grid refinement.

### Student Paper: Convergent cross-mapping and pairwise asymmetric inference

Convergent cross-mapping (CCM) is a technique for computing specific kinds of correlations between sets of times series.

### SPACS students excel in research, garner awards

In recent days, several SPACS students have exhibited and gained plaudits for their research.

• Marcus Daum gave an invited talk at the OSCAR celebration of scholarship on May 6th.
• Paul McNulty won 3rd place at the College of Science Undergraduate Research Colloquium on May 1st.
• Pragyansmita Nayak won first place among graduate student posters, and a $100 reward, at the May 2nd meeting of the Mid-Atlantic region of the Sigma Xi National Science Honor Society. • Ryan Pfeifle won second place and a$500 reward at the Mason Science Slam on May 1st.

Congratulations to these and all of our student researchers, who continue to stand out in their research endeavors.

### Mason Physics student, Nathan Secrest, discovers black hole

A Dark Discovery: Mason PhD Student Identifies a Mini-Supermassive Black Hole