News: 2023

Dhayaa Anbajagane, University of Chicago, "Inflation w/ lensing"

Congratulations to Jisheng Zhang for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on “Thermal and Magnetic History of Rocky Exoplanets”.

Data to reveal flows of matter and energy close to black holes, elemental makeup of the universe

Congratulations to Georgios Zacharegkas for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on “Modeling the non-linear scales in Cosmology via the galaxy-halo connection with applications in DES Y3”.

Leslie Rogers, Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Chicago, "Investigating the Biological Potential of Moons in the Uranus System"

Congratulations to Clarke Esmerian for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on “Modeling Dust Production, Growth, and Destruction in Reionization-Era Galaxies”.

Congratulations to graduate student Karia Dibert, who has been awarded a William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship for the 2023-2024 academic year.

Congratulations to Rebecca Diesing for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on “Unraveling Particle Acceleration and the Nonthermal Universe”.

Prof Michael Gladders will receive a Quantrell Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching at the University next week. Mike was nominated by the students in his Astronomy Field Course, an innovative course he designed that gets astronomy majors directly engaged in research with the Magellan telescope. This is one of the highest honors for faculty at the University.

Aster Taylor (BS, Astrophysics, 2023) is one of 15 Hertz Fellows selected for this honor, which is awarded to doctoral students who have the "extraordinary creativity necessary to tackle problems others can’t solve."

Most people seek warmer destinations for travel to escape the tough Chicago winters. Brad Benson, on the other hand, sets his sights on the South Pole nearly every year. On his list of top reasons to visit: the intense cold creating extremely low levels of moisture in the air, dryer even than the highest mountain peaks in the world. 

Exoplanet GJ 1214b is too hot to be habitable, but likely contains water vapor.

Wendy Freedman, John and Marion Sullivan University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics,  has been elected to the Royal Society, a fellowship of many of the world’s most eminent scientists and the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. This year, 59 scientists from around the world were elected Fellows or Foreign Members of the Society for their outstanding contributions to science.

Improvements include upgraded receiver, solar panels to power the observatory and data processing pipeline.

Led by PI Privitera, the DAMIC-M experiment published it’s first, world-leading results
searching for sub-GeV dark matter via electron scattering in silicon CCDs.