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Congratulations to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration for being awarded the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The citation reads: "For the first image of a supermassive black hole, taken by means of an Earth-sized alliance of telescopes.”  The $3 million prize will be shared equally among the 347 co-authors.

In the year since its launch, the Parker Solar Probe has collected a host of scientific data from two close passes of the Sun and is now speeding toward another close solar approach on September 1, 2019. Named for S. Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus Eugene Parker, who theorized the solar wind as the constant outflow of particles and magnetic fields from the Sun, the Parker Solar Probe is the first NASA mission to be named for a living person.

University of Chicago professor Wendy Freedman and colleagues have a new measurement for the rate of expansion in the modern universe, suggesting the space between galaxies is stretching faster than scientists would expect. The paper, “An Independent Determination of the Hubble Constant Based on the Tip of the Red Giant Branch,” Freedman et al, was published on July 12, 2019, in The Astrophysical Journal.

Remarkably recognizable to astrophotographers today, this stunning image of the star forming Orion Nebula was captured in 1901 by American astronomer and telescope designer George Ritchey. The original glass photographic plate was digitized by the University of Chicago Library in a partnership with Professor Rich Kron and undergraduate interns in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics to develop code for analyzing high-resolution image files made from historic photographic plates in order to extract astrometry and photometry data from them.