Departmental researchers have institutional access to advanced ground-based telescopes worldwide, including the twin 6.5-m Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory and the South Pole Telescope, whose SPT-3G camera — built with more than 16,000 superconducting detectors — is mapping the cosmic microwave background. The department also built and operates MAROON-X, a high-resolution optical spectrograph at Gemini North that achieves sub-meter-per-second radial-velocity precision in the search for planets around the nearest stars. The department is also a major user of the leading space observatories, including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Members of the department hold leadership roles across the major cosmological surveys and survey facilities: the Dark Energy Survey, SDSS-V, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
The University of Chicago is a founding partner in the 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), one of the next generation of extremely large telescopes, now under construction in the Chilean Andes. Its seven 8.4-meter segments are among the largest monolithic optical mirrors ever made. We are also a leader in cosmic ray detection at the Auger Observatory, a core member of the SkAI Institute for AI in Astronomy, and are home to the Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility and an ISO Class 5 cleanroom.
The department enjoys strong connections with the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, the Departments of Physics and Geophysical Sciences, and the Enrico Fermi Institute at UChicago, and we have active relationships with scientists, historians, and public educators at the Adler Planetarium. These connections enable our faculty and students to expand their collaborative partnerships, broadly explore research themes, and further extend their outreach to the community.
Key partnerships with Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab enable collaborations with research groups in quantum science and particle physics, as well as access to facilities for nanofabrication, particle detector development, and supercomputing resources. Computing on campus is supported by the Research Computing Center.