Graduate student Dominique Segura-Cox was recently interviewed by the NRAO. Listen to it here.

We begin the new academic year with several new and newly promoted members of our faculty: Jessica Evans, Matthew Turk, Paul Ricker, and Edward Seidel.

Graduate student Mani Chandra has been named the second recipient of the Mr. and Mrs. Hsiang-Pai and Wen-Hua Chu Department of Astronomy Excellence in Research Graduate Student Award. Congratulations! This award is now fully endowed and it will be awarded annually.

Using Hubble Telescope observations of exploding stars, Prof. Ryan Foley and collaborators have revised upwards the rate of cosmic expansion.

Congratulations to the Astronomy Class of 2016 for a job well done! Best wishes on your future endeavors--you make us proud!

A team of researchers, including astronomers at the University of Illinois, have uncovered the existence of a dwarf "dark galaxy" lurking nearly 4 billion light-years away from Earth. The discovery was made using the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Several graduate students have won awards recently. Erin Cox and Dominique Segura-Cox have won the Graduate College Academic Excellence and Good Citizenship Award. Andrew Nadolski is one of the winners of the 2016 NSF Graduate Fellowship. Miguel Holgado won a ...

Evidence of two near-Earth supernova explosions appears in the current issue of Nature. Prof. Brian Fields discusses these new findings and how nearby supernovae could affect the Earth.

Joaquin Vieira, Assistant Professor of Astronomy and leader of the Observational Cosmology Laboratory at Illinois, has been named to the Science and Technology Definition Team for NASA's upcoming Far IR Surveyor, one of four flagship astronomy missions selected for the 2020 Decadal Survey.

The Astronomy Department congratulates our graduate students and faculty named to the "List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent" by the Center for Teaching Excellence for Fall 2015: Ms. Susmita Adhikari, Mr. Di Wen, and Profs. Bryan Dunne, Brian Fields, and Athol Kemball.

Yue Shen, an assistant professor of astronomy and a faculty affiliate at NCSA has been named a Sloan Research Fellow for 2016. Yue is an observational astronomer who has built a broad and prolific research program featuring observational and theoretical studies of supermassive black holes.

NASA announced the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope mission has passed the final stage of review and will launch as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope in the 2020s. University of Illinois astronomy professor Ryan Foley is heading up one of the science investigation teams for WFIRST.

After years of preparatory studies, NASA is formally starting an astrophysics mission designed to help unlock the secrets of the universe -- the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST).

The Astronomy Department will host the first "Astronomy on Tap," a monthly informal discussion about some of the biggest questions in the Universe, on Thursday, Feb 18, 6-7 pm in the back room of Pizza M at 208 W. Main St. in Urbana. Future sessions will be held the third Thursday of each month.

Following the detection of the first gravitational wave event by LIGO on Sept. 16, 2015, the Dark Energy Survey team, including astronomers at Illinois, rapidly turned the DECam to that sky region to search for a visible light counterpart. No event was found, but is a model for future follow-ups.