University of Virginia, College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Near-Field Cosmology at Virginia

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Galaxy Stars

Star Formation At Virginia

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Apogee

Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) at Virginia

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Apogee Hardware

Instrumentation Laboratory at Virginia

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Planet

Theoretical and Computational Astrophysics at Virginia

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Galaxy Stars

Astrochemistry at Virginia

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World Class Facilities at Virginia

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Pluto

Planetary Science at Virginia

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John Wilson Awarded the Muhlmann Prize of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific

Dr. John Wilson, a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Astronomy, is the recipient of the 2017 Maria and Eric Muhlmann award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. This award recognizes recent significant observational results made possible by innovative advances in astronomical instrumentation, software, or observational infrastructure and is one of the few in the astronomical world focused on instrumentation.

UVA Astronomer Celebrates the Success of Cassini

After 20 years in space, and 13 years orbiting the planet Saturn, the Cassini mission is coming to an end. University of Virginia planetary astronomer Anne Verbiscer, a participating scientist with the mission, is attending this week's end-of-mission celebration at the California Institute of Technology, near NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is enjoying the final ride with hundreds of fellow Cassini scientists.

Success! New Horizons Team Sees Occultation by 2014 MU69

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.

UVA Students, Faculty, and Staff Chase Shadow of Kuiper Belt Object Across South Africa

Three UVA undergraduates along with Astronomy faculty and staff mentors have returned from South Africa, data in hand, after an attempt to place three UVA telescopes in the path of the shadow of the faint distant Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 as it passed in front of a distant star. This Kuiper Belt object is the target of a January 1, 2019 flyby by the New Horizons spacecraft, which encountered Pluto in the summer of 2015.

UVa Astronomers Track Distant Star Cluster with Adaptive Optics

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.

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News & Announcements

Hannah Richstein named Jefferson Scholar

June 7, 2023

Graduate student, Hannah Richstein, has been named one of the 35 world-class students receivng the Jefferson Fellowship. The ... Read»

NSF Grant Will Fund Astronomer in Search of the Origins of the Universe

June 6, 2023

The night sky is full of clues about the origins of our universe; the challenge is developing technology sensitive enough to see them. Because light from far away sources takes a long time to... Read»

PBS NOVA Special - first results from JWST

March 2, 2023

 

The James Webb Space Telescope has provided scientists with previously unimaginable details of galaxies millions of light years away. Now astronomers including the University of Virginia’... Read»

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