Department of Astronomy

Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, in 2012 the Jefferson Scholars Foundation began recognizing University faculty who have demonstrated both excellence in teaching and exceeding care for their students. This award honors those teachers in our community who have gone the extra mile in fulfilling their vocation without regard for their own advancement. This year, Mark Whittle was nominated and has been designated as a 2020 recipient. Professor Whittle has been in the Astronomy department since 1986 and his research interests include active galaxies and cosmology.

During the virtual Astronomy Department Diploma ceremony on 17 May, the winners of the Lawrence W. Fredrick award of the Astronomy department and the winners of three undergraduate Astronomy awards were announced.  

Congratulations to Thankful Cromartie who was awarded this year's Allan T. Gwathmey Memorial Award. This award comes from the UVa Graduate School of the College of Arts and Sciences for the best paper on a "fundamental problem in physical sciences" by a current graduate student or recent PhDs. It carries a cash award of $6,500 and is a great recognition of Thankful's work.

The AAS Fellows program was established in 2019 to confer recognition upon AAS members for achievement and extraordinary service to the field of astronomy and the American Astronomical Society. AAS Fellows are recognized for their contributions toward the AAS mission of enhancing and sharing humanity's scientific understanding of the universe. Roger Chevalier was recently selected as an American Astronomical Society Legacy Fellow.

A group of astronomers, including U.Va.'s Craig Sarazin, have observed two groups of galaxies slamming into one another at a speed of about 4 million miles per hour.  The colliding groups will eventually merge and form a single cluster of galaxies; these are the largest objects in the Universe.  Clusters contain as much material as one million, billion stars.  This cosmic train wreck was observed with a number of space and ground-based observatories, including by U.Va. astronomers using the Apache Point Observatory (APO) in New Mexico.  U.Va.