Department of Astronomy

On July 17, a primitive solar system object that’s more than 6.5 billion kilometers away passed in front of a distant star as seen from Earth. Twenty-four telescopes and dozens of astronomers, including UVA faculty, staff, and students, were deployed by the New Horizons team to a remote part of Argentina in an effort to catch the shadow of the object - an event that's known as an occulation. Several telescopes, including one operated by UVA astronomer Anne Verbiscer, were in precisely the right place at the right time to catch its fleeting shadow.

The Deparartment of Astronomy is pleased to announce the following awards presented at Final Exercises on May 20, 2017:

Research Associate Tobias Fritz, along with graduate students Sean Linden and Paul Zivick in Nitya Kallivayalil’s Near-field Cosmology group, combined images from Gemini South’s wide-field adaptive optics system with data from the Hubble Space Telescope to determine the proper motion of a distant cluster of stars. The observations, the first to use ground-based adaptive optics to precisely measure the motion of a cluster at such a large distance, allowed astronomers to set a lower limit for the mass of our Milky Way while providing clues about the cluster’s origin.

Professor Kelsey Johnson teaches her students to ask deep, meaningful, and provocative questions in her ASTR 1270 Unsolved Mysteries in the Universe course. See more about this amazing course from an inspirational teacher in this video at UVA Today.

Associate Professor Kelsey Johnson hosted authors Dava Sobel (The Glass Universe, Galileo’s Daughter, Longitude, The Planets) and Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures) for a sold out show at the Paramount Theater on March 25th as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book.  Their lively discussion on issues related to women and minorities in the history science and space exploration received a standing ovation.