2024-05-16 - Professor Gautham Narayan has been approved by the Urbana-Champaign Campus Promotion & Tenure Committee for promotion to Associate Processor with indefinite tenure! Let us take a moment to congratulate Professor Gautham Narayan on this great accomplishment.

2024-05-16 - Astronomers and astrophysicists including Tony Wong, Helvi Witek, Athol Kemball, Fred Lamb, Jon Thaler, and Inga Karliner meet with founding NCSA director Larry Smarr at the Institute for Genomic Biology.  Smarr will receive an honorary degree at Commencement.

2024-05-06 - UIUC Astronomy graduate students Liam Nolan, Alex Green, Margaret Shepard, and Tanner Murphy and Astronomy undergrad Ferdinand Ferdinand hosted the Science at the Market booth at the Urbana Farmer's Market, allowing more than 380 visitors to participate in safe solar viewing and other astronomy demonstrations.  This will be followed on subsequent Saturdays by presentations from other...

2024-05-06 - We want to congratulate the successful thesis defense of the newly minted Dr. Kedar Phadke. He is pictured celebrating the amazing news. The committee members that joined the celebration are Professor Joaquin Vieira, Professor Felipe Menanteau, Professor Paul Ricker (Remote), and Department Chair Tony Wong.  

2024-05-02 - The UIUC Talkshow recently interview Professor Charles Gammie, who was recently endowed the Ikenberry Chair.

2024-04-24 - We want to take a moment to congratulate our graduate and undergraduate students for their well deserved awards.  Layla S. Ryan Scholarship Award 2024 Winner: Holly Wingren Stanley Wyatt...

2024-04-12 - It was a day to remember, as nearly 98% of the Sun was blocked by the Moon in a partial solar eclipse visible from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.  The Department of Astronomy quickly distributed its remaining supply of about 800 eclipse glasses and a long queue of eclipse-watchers waited for a view of the Sun through a telescope.  The partial eclipse ran for about...

2024-04-09 - Professor Charles Gammie was named the Ikenberry Endowed Chair in January 2024.  He was recently honored by the University.  The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences asked him and other honorees how their award affects them and their work and published an article with their responses.

2024-04-04 - We celebrate the accomplishment of second-year graduate student, Liam Nolan.  He has been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Resarch Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP). The purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to help ensure the quality, vitality,...

2024-04-04 - We want to congratulate the successful thesis defense of the newly minted Dr. Kwok Sun Tang. He has successfully defended his thesis. He is pictured with Professor Paul Ricker, Professor Gautham Narayan, and his advisor Professor Matthew Turk.

2024-03-28 -   The University of Illinois Astronomy Department will set up a solar eclipse observing station behind Foellinger Auditorium (see map) from around 1-3pm on April 8, weather permitting.  At the maximum eclipse around 2:05pm, the Sun will be almost 98% blocked by the Moon!  Check out the Sun's appearance through a small telescope, and pick up a free pair of eclipse glasses to enjoy...

2024-03-12 - We want to congratulate the successful thesis defense of the newly minted Dr. Patrick Aleo. He has successfully defended his thesis with his advisor, Professor Gautham Narayan. 

2024-02-20 - Led by Prof. Decker French, the IDEAS program (Illinois Developing Equity in Astrophysics Summer School) has once again received financial support from the Illinois Space Grant Consortium!  IDEAS is an 8-week summer program, running from June 3 to July 26, that matches undergraduate students from historically underrepresented groups with faculty at the University of Illinois doing research...

2023-11-15 - Prof. Leslie Looney is part of the team that created this beautiful image of the circumstellar disk of HL Tauri in dust polarization using ALMA at a resolution of ~5 au-- coming out soon in Nature. They find more dust polarization in the gaps than the rings, suggesting that a dust alignment mechanism in the gaps is aerodynamically aligning the effectively prolate (kind of like an American...

2023-11-14 - Prof. Charles Gammie has been named an Ikenberry Endowed Chair, one of the most prestigious named appointments at the Urbana-Champaign campus.  Prof. Gammie, who previously held the Donald Biggar Willett Chair in Physics, is a Professor in both Physics and Astronomy, and is known for his theoretical modeling of accretion disks and black holes, including the supermassive black holes being...