News: Research

Meet new Department member: Tsang Keung Chan, Inaugural Margarett Burbidge Prize Postdoc Fellow

Study including UChicago scientists creates map of nearby stellar streams and dark matter

University of Chicago physicist Abby Vieregg is leading an international experiment that essentially uses the ice in Antarctica as a giant detector to find extremely energetic particles from outer space. Recently approved by NASA, the $20 million project will build an instrument to fly above the Antarctic in a balloon, launching in December 2024.

Astro2020 survey prioritizes UChicago-affiliated projects such as Giant Magellan Telescope, CMB-S4

Congratulations to Gregory Gilbert for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on "Toward an Accurate Census of Exoplanets and Exoplanetary Systems" (PhD Advisor: Daniel Fabrycky)

UChicago-led South Pole Telescope helps pinpoint location of supermassive black hole in galaxy Centaurus A

Cosmologist discusses what happened after the Big Bang, ‘breaking’ the Standard Model of Physics

The Dark Energy Survey mapped an eighth of the night sky from a mountaintop in Chile.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey founder Richard Kron leaves legacy of scientific discovery and education

Jazmine Jefferson is a second year PhD student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

 “This work blazes a path to laboratory investigations of a variety of astrophysical processes mediated by magnetized turbulence,” said Don Lamb, the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago and principal investigator of the Turbulent Dynamo team National Laser User’s Facility project. “It’s truly exciting to see the scientific results that the ingenuity of this team is making possible.”

The solar wind is a flow of particles that comes off the sun at about one million miles per hour and travels throughout the entire solar system. First proposed in the 1950s by University of Chicago physicist Eugene Parker, the solar wind is visible in the halo around the sun during an eclipse and sometimes when the particles hit the Earth’s atmosphere—as the aurora borealis, or northern lights.

The Giant Magellan Telescope announces fabrication of the sixth of seven of the world’s largest monolithic mirrors. These mirrors will allow astronomers to see farther into the universe with more detail than any other optical telescope before.