News: Faculty

Congratulations to Sam Passaglia for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on "The Black Hole Window on Cosmic Inflation". Sam has accepted a postdoctoral position at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.

Congratulations to Philip Mansfield for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on "Why Do Dark Matter Halos Die Together? An Intergalactic Murder Mystery". Philip has received a position of a KIPAC fellow at Stanford University.

“Finding who you are, what you do best and what you enjoy doing will bring you in the right direction—in research, and more broadly, in life,” says Prof. Paolo Privitera. “For this reason, I do not rush the students to focus on a single big project when they start working with me.”

Congratulations to Prof. Paolo Privitera

Fermilab, UChicago scientists tap South Pole Telescope data to shed light on universe

A team of scientists have demonstrated how to "weigh" galaxy clusters using light from the earliest moments of the universe - a new method that could help shed light on dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the cosmos, such as how the universe formed.

A new solar telescope in Hawaii has captured images of the sun unlike any seen before.  Professor Robert Rosner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and one of the lead investigators on the project, says he’s been waiting for almost 40 years to see images like the ones recently captured.

Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences honors UChicago scientist’s pioneering work.
 

The Laboratory Astrophysics Division (LAD) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) is awarding its 2020 Laboratory Astrophysics Prize to Dr. James Truran of the University of Chicago. This prize is given for his theoretical work on early star formation and the nucleosynthesis history of the universe, as well as for his seminal contributions to the study of astrophysical thermonuclear explosions, nucleosynthesis, and the use of nuclear-decay chronometers to determine ages of stellar and terrestrial matter.

NASA mission named for pioneering UChicago scientist produces landmark research

When NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launches in 2021, one of its most anticipated contributions to astronomy will be the study of exoplanets—planets orbiting distant stars. Among the most pressing questions in exoplanet science is: Can a small, rocky exoplanet orbiting close to a red dwarf star hold onto an atmosphere?

In a series of four papers in the Astrophysical Journal, a team of astronomers proposes a new method of using Webb to determine whether a rocky exoplanet has an atmosphere. The technique, which involves measuring the planet’s temperature as it passes behind its star and then comes back into view, is significantly faster than more traditional methods of atmospheric detection like transmission spectroscopy.

“We find that Webb could easily infer the presence or absence of an atmosphere around a dozen known rocky exoplanets with less than 10 hours of observing time per planet,” said Jacob Bean of the University of Chicago, a co-author on three of the papers.