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...

2023-10-06 - Third-year grad student, Grant Merz, has been awarded an LSST LINCC incubator as PI. LSST, which stands for Legacy Survey of Space and Time, awarded only four PIs worldwide. Congratulations, Grant!

2023-10-03 - In a new study published in the journal Nature, Astronomy-affiliated faculty Siegfried Eggl and colleagues highlight the impact that satellites for mobile internet are having on ground-based astronomy.  See this news release from Illinois Aerospace Engineering.

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...