News

2025-06-24 - The Department of Astronomy sadly announces the passing of our friend and colleague, Icko Iben, Jr., distinguished professor emeritus of astronomy and physics.  Professor Iben's research made an indelible mark on astrophysics and on this campus.  He pioneered the theory of how stars work and how they pass through their dramatic life cycles.   His specialty was the late phases of stellar evolution...

2025-06-24 - It began with a problem of scale. Modern telescopes like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, set to begin operations in October 2025, are poised to revolutionize astronomy by capturing unprecedented volumes of data—millions of time-variable astrophysical events across the sky each night. But with this scale comes a new challenge: How do you process, classify, and interpret this firehose of...

2025-05-02 - The astronomy department is proud to announce its Spring 2025 Academic Awards. The winners were recognized in an online ceremony on May 2nd, 2025. The ceremony was led by Department Chair Tony Wong and Director of Undergraduate Studies Professor Bryan Dunne and...

2025-04-29 - The University of Illinois Department of Astronomy welcomed students, faculty, and alumni to its annual Astrofest event on April 25. Hosted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the day-long celebration of research and discovery featured a mix of poster sessions, lightning talks, demonstrations, and plenary lectures.Astrofest started with a morning poster session, where students...

2025-04-22 - NASA has awarded $1 million to DeepDISC-Euclid, a groundbreaking interdisciplinary research project spearheaded by the Department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This innovative project was significantly driven by graduate student Grant Merz, whose leadership and key contributions have been instrumental in developing the foundational deep learning framework, DeepDISC....

2025-04-04 - Beneath its weathered dome, the Campus Observatory has housed groundbreaking discoveries and served as a gathering place where generations of students have explored the cosmos and built lasting bonds. But in recent years, the observatory has been weathered by time and the elements, prompting a dedicated...

2025-02-10 - Congratulations to Prof. Leslie Looney, one of this year's recipients of the Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching!  Leslie is not just a captivating and popular teacher, but has long been the driving force behind innovation in our curriculum.  He will be honored at a ceremony in April.

2024-10-02 - The following passage is an except from an article about the proposed Hop-Enabled Real-time Observatory Information and Coordination (HEROIC) service from NCSA: "With hundreds of observatories scattered throughout the world, there has never been a better time for astronomers to observe the infinite universe that lies beyond Earth. At any moment in time, a telescope pointed at the night sky...

2024-09-19 - The following except below is from a recent article. Please follow the link for more information. Funded by a five-year, $20 million grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Simons Foundation, the National...

2024-08-30 - One of the largest ever allocations of competitive telescope time on the James Webb Space Telescope will go to Prof. Shen's group for the North ecliptic pole EXtragalactic Unified Survey (NEXUS).  NEXUS will address a range of topics from the evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes to violent stellar deaths in supernovae and the coldest stars in the Milky Way.  An...

2024-08-30 - New research by Prof. Xin Liu and graduate student Grant Merz is highlighted in an LAS News article (see link below).  The project, known as Detection, Instance Segmentation, and Classification with Deep Learning, or DeepDISC, leverages machine learning—a branch of AI intertwined with computer science.

2024-08-29 - We want to congratulate the successful thesis defense of the newly minted Dr. Frankie Encalada on August 23, 2024. He is pictured with his committee members Professor Leslie Looney, Professor Tony Wong, and Professor Charles Gammie

2024-08-26 - Among the projects funded by a five-year agreement between the University of Illinois and Cardiff University in the United Kingdom is an inter-university collaboration on galaxy evolution led by Prof. Decker French (Illinois) and Dr. Timothy Davis (Cardiff).  To kick...

2024-08-02 - We want to congratulate the successful thesis defense of the newly minted Dr. Cail Daley. He is pictured during his thesis defense presentation. The committee members that joined the celebration are Professor Gilbert Holder, Professor Paul Ricker, Professor Jeffrey Filippini, and Professor Brian David Fields (Remote)

2024-06-20 - We want to congratulate the successful thesis defense of the newly minted Dr. Melanie Archipley. She is pictured celebrating the amazing news. The committee members that joined the celebration are Professor Joaquin Vieira, Professor Felipe Menanteau, Professor Gilbert Holder, Professor Thomas Crawford, and Professor Brian David Fields (Remote)