When Annie Zeng walked into her first research conference last May, she didn’t arrive with a lab group or a familiar cohort of classmates. She arrived alone, and she immediately felt like it.“I honestly felt very nervous,” said Annie, a senior pursuing a double degree in...
Scientists have been able to detect the presence of gravitational waves since 2015, when the first instruments capable of doing so were set up. However, these instruments capture many other signals as well. Sometimes these signals’ sources are easy to identify—perhaps there was a small earthquake,...
The universe is vast, but astronomers don’t have to look too far to find something genuinely new. Researchers at the Center for AstroPhysical Surveys (CAPS) used the South Pole Telescope to probe one of the most complex regions of the sky, the crowded...
When a nova erupts, it’s often described as a single dramatic blast—but new observations suggest the real story is far more complex. In a recent Nature Astronomy paper, an international team used the CHARA Array’s cutting-edge...
The Simons Foundation has awarded $8 million to launch the Simons Collaboration on Black Holes and Strong Gravity, bringing together 12 leading scientists from across the globe, including Illinois Physics professor and Astronomy affiliate professor...
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...
