Department of Astronomy

The Univesity of Virginia's Center for Global Inquiry has awarded a grant to support the Virginia/Chilean Universtiy Network for Astronomy, or VICUNAS. The program leverages UVA’s 20 years of collaboration in Chile with a new, state-of-the-art infrared spectrograph – called APOGEE-2 – that will soon yield an unprecedented survey of the southern half of the Milky Way. Astronomy professor Steve Majewski and senior research scientist John Wilson are working with seven Chilean universities to operate the instrument, sharing time, knowledge and expertise and exchanging students.

UVA astronomer Michael Skrutskie and colleagues have taken advantage of a chance alignment of Jupiter's moons to study Io's Loki Patera volcano and its huge lava lake with 40 times better resolution than any past Earth-based observations.

Read more at EOS Earth and Space Science News