Graduate student Frankie Encalada and Professor Leslie Looney are part of the international team that imaged the circumstellar disks around 19 very young protostars, revealing the beginning of planet formation, and disks that are different and less settled than the older disk systems....

Triple congratulations to Prof. Yue Shen. Not only has he been approved by campus to be promoted to Full Professor, but he has won the 2023 Campus Distinguished Promotion Award and he has been appointed a 2023 LAS Dean's Distinguished Professor Scholar.

Undergrad Lilly Kettler, grad student Kedar Phadke, and Prof. Joaquin Vieira are part of a team that detected organic molecules in the furthest galaxy to date. Read about it here.

Congratulations to the Astronomy Class of 2023!   May 2023: Anya Abraham, Rithika Baskar, Simon Boyle, Qifeng Cheng, Philip Coady. Itay Gozalzani, Zhongxing Hu, Kitetsu Kaku, Ilia Kiato, Aaron Koller, Tanushree Kumar, Caleb Lair, Jay Mahajan, Lily Mrazek, Alexander Newman, Yunsuk Oh, Michael Ostoja- Starzewski, Bhavya Pardasani , Manali Patel , Raj Patel , Shavan Patel , Aassik Pazhani ,...

Congratulations to Prof. Xin Liu for being named a Norman P. Jones Professorial Scholar! This is a college award based upon her outstanding contribution to the college’s educational mission including research, teaching, service, and diversity and inclusion.

Congratulations to Prof. Gautham Narayan for being awarded the Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Award! This is a college award based upon his outstanding contribution to the college’s educational mission including research, teaching, citizenship, and diversity and inclusion.

The annual Girl's Astronomy Summer Camp returns this year. High school students entering 10th to 12th grades are encouraged to attend. The dates are June 26 and 27. More information, including the link to the application can be found here.

Grad student Melanie Archipley spent several months at the South Pole telescope. Read the article here

Congratulations to Illinois undergrads Ian Brunton and Connor O’Mahoney, Prof. Brian Fields, and collaborators! They have a new paper out that show that x-ray luminous supernovae could have lethal consequences up to 160 light years away. Read the article here.

Congratulations to Dr. Samantha Thrush!  She successful defended her thesis today with her advisor Prof. Athol Kemball.

A team led by Illinois astronomers Yu-Ching Chen, Prof. Xin Liu and Prof. Yue Shen discovered a rare dual quasar system when the Universe was only 3 billion years old. Their findings are reported in the April 5 issue of Nature. Read more here.

Congratulations to Prof. Decker French! She was awarded a Center for Advanced Study Fellowship. For this fellowship, she will be studying tidal disruption events as supermassive black hole laboratories. Stars passing close enough to a supermassive black hole...

He is the recipient of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship, which supports scholar fellowships at African higher education institutions to foster research collaboration, graduate student teaching/mentoring, and curriculum co-development. Prof. Kemball will have an appointment as Distinguished Professor and the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand,...

He received a prestigious NSF Career Award: Understanding the Nature of Dark Energy with the Young Supernova Experiment and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time. These are NSF's most prestigious awards that support early-career faculty who serve as academic role models in research and education and who lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

LAS Quadrangle recently published an article about the Observatory. Read about it here.