News

Ben Ryan, who recently defended his thesis, won the 2018 Mr. and Mrs. Hsiang-pai and Wen-hua Chu Department Of Astronomy Excellence in Research Graduate Student Award. This award has been given by Prof. Emerita You-Hua Chu in honor of her parents, to a graduate student. Congratulations, Ben!

Every year, the University of Illinois awards six people the Chancellor’s Academic Professional Excellence (CAPE) Award. This year, Prof. and Assistant Chair Bryan Dunne was one of the winners. Congratulations, Bryan!    

Charlie Young, a sophomore in CS+Astronomy, has created an analytics program for Fighting Illini baseball. Read here for more details

Sidney Lower, a senior minoring in Astronomy, has won the 2018 Layla S. Ryan Scholarship award. The Layla Suzanne Ryan Memorial Scholarship is given to a Junior or Senior major or minor in Astronomy who exhibits excellence in community service participation with a preference for women...

Prof. Eliu Huerta and Grad Student Daniel George are pioneering the use of Deep Learning to study gravitational waves. Read more here

The Dark Energy Survey releases first three years of data. Illinois plays a large role in the data and the science. The release consists of 38,000 single exposure images over roughly 5,000 square degrees, resulting in nearly 310 million galaxies and 80 million stars cataloged. Read more...

Professor Yue Shen, post-doctoral researcher David Starkey, and graduate student Jennifer Li, along with researchers from the Pennsylvania State University, recently announced new measurements of supermassive black holes. Read more here

Prof. Joaquin Vieira, grad students Kedar Phadke and Sreevani Jarugula, and undergrad Sydney Lower are among the astronomers who have made recent discoveries about how galaxies were formed. Read full article

Daniel George won first place in the SC17 ACM Student Research Competition!! This work included new deep learning algorithms, black hole simulations with the Einstein Toolkit, and LIGO gravitational wave data analysis. Congratulations, Daniel!

Prof. Joaquin Vieira and graduate student Kedar Phadke will be among the first astronomers to observe with NASA’s $10B James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2019.

It is a great pleasure to proudly announce that our own Prof. Gabrielle Allen was elected a 2017 Fellow of the APS. Being elected an APS Fellow is a major recognition of her professional accomplishment from the leading organization of physicists. She provides international leadership in development of widely-used simulation frameworks for numerical relativity, relativistic astrophysics, and other...

The Astronomy Building recently underwent an overhaul of its HVAC system, which led to a dramatic decrease in our energy use. As a result, Astronomy is being awarded a 2017 Energy Conservation Incentive Program (ECIP) award! Congratulations!

Astronomy on Tap, the popular outreach event sponsored by the Astronomy Department, recently celebrated its one-year anniversary.

Joaquin Vieira, an assistant professor of astronomy and of physics at the University of Illinois and a faculty affiliate at the National Center for Computing Applications (NCSA) has been named a Sloan Research Fellow for 2017.

A recently discovered galaxy is forming stars at an extraordinary pace. Astronomers have shown that, compared to the Milky Way, which forms roughly one Sun-sized star per year, stars in the galaxy SPT 0346-32 are forming at a rate of about 4,500 times higher—one of the highest rates seen!