2026-05-08 - Researchers, students, and faculty gathered Friday, April 24, for Illini AstroFest, a daylong event designed to showcase astrophysics research, spark collaboration, and build community among scientists at every stage of their careers.Held at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the event brought together participants from a wide range of disciplines, reflecting the increasingly...
2026-04-30 - The astronomy department is proud to announce its Spring 2026 Academic Awards. The winners were recognized in an online ceremony on April 30, 2026. The ceremony was led by Department Chair Tony Wong and Director of Undergraduate Studies Professor Bryan Dunne and...
2026-04-30 - What happens at the end of science? Philosophy?It is the kind of question that can pause a conversation. Not because science fails, and not because philosophy is waiting at the edge of the laboratory to correct it, but because every discipline, if you follow it far enough, begins to run into its own foundations. What counts as truth? What can be known? What is real? What do numbers describe, and...
2026-04-09 - Last month, at least two major, but unrelated, meteor events occurred in the skies over highly populated areas of the U.S. Both fireballs, often referred to as bolides, were seen — and heard — during daylight hours, suggesting they were unusually large. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign aerospace engineering communications coordinator ...
2026-04-06 - The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign each year presents Campus Awards for Excellence in Instruction to exceptional faculty and staff members, graduate teaching assistants, and advisors campuswide. The recipients were honored at a March 25 ceremony.Awardees are cited for sustained excellence and innovation in undergraduate and graduate teaching, undergraduate and graduate advising and...
2026-03-31 - LIKE MILLIONS of other kids, Charlie Young, CS+astronomy & statistics ’20, dreamed of being a big-league baseball player—and never made it past high school ball. "Fortunately, I was better at computer science." And by the time he reached Illinois in 2016, there happened to be an analytics revolution going on in the national...
2026-03-26 - Four faculty members at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have been named 2025 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Astronomy and...
2026-03-19 - When Annie Zeng walked into her first research conference last May, she didn’t arrive with a lab group or a familiar cohort of classmates. She arrived alone, and she immediately felt like it.“I honestly felt very nervous,” said Annie, a senior pursuing a double degree in mathematics and computer science...
2026-02-26 - Scientists have been able to detect the presence of gravitational waves since 2015, when the first instruments capable of doing so were set up. However, these instruments capture many other signals as well. Sometimes these signals’ sources are easy to identify—perhaps there was a small earthquake, or an airplane passed overhead—but some of the collected data have remained mysterious.Recent work...
2026-02-26 - An international team of astronomers led by Dr. Thato Manamela at the University of Pretoria has identified the most distant hydroxyl (OH) megamaser ever detected — a powerful radio signal emitted by a merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years from Earth....
2026-02-20 - Sude Baltaci has been named a Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award winner by the American Astronomical Society, recognizing the excellence of their poster presentation at the 247th AAS Meeting held this winter in Phoenix, Arizona. Baltaci is a fourth-year student...
2026-02-18 - The College of LAS has selected 19 professors, graduate students, lecturers, and advisors as the recipients of this year’s teaching and advising awards. “It is a privilege to celebrate these remarkable educators and advisors who fulfill our educational mission within the College of LAS,” said Venetria K. Patton, the Harry E. Preble Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. “From...
2026-02-17 - As one might expect on a bitterly cold Thursday evening, the bar fills up early. Conversations overlap, beer is served, glasses clink. Then things get interesting. Someone sets up a projector. As the crowd jockeys for a good view, in walks Charles Gammie, an Illinois astronomy and physics professor who was part of the...
2026-02-10 - Astronomy professor Leslie Looney recently appeared on The UIUC Talkshow for a wide-ranging conversation about what astronomy really is—and what it means to explore a universe that’s often difficult to even imagine. In the episode, he reflects on how astronomers turn faint signals...
2026-01-20 - The universe is vast, but astronomers don’t have to look too far to find something genuinely new. Researchers at the Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS) used the South Pole Telescope to probe one of the most complex regions of the sky, the crowded inner Milky Way, and uncovered powerful, short-lived bursts of millimeter-wavelength light from two...