Posts by McDonald Observatory
March 10, 2025
Board of Visitors Winter Meeting Shares Astronomy Highlights
The 2025 Board of Visitors Winter Meeting took place February 28 and March 1 on The University of Texas at Austin campus. Over 140 members and guests joined us for a reception at the Texas Science & Natural History Museum, […]
February 20, 2025
UT Austin Astronomer Wins Scialog: Early Science with the LSST Award
UT Austin’s Caroline Morley is among the prestigious group of astronomers selected by Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) for the first year of its Scialog: Early Science with the LSST award. This is a three-year initiative that aims to advance the foundational science […]
January 14, 2025
Newfound Galaxy Class May Indicate Early Black Hole Growth
In December 2022, less than six months after commencing science operations, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope revealed something never seen before: numerous red objects that appear small on the sky, which scientists soon called “little red dots” (LRDs). Though these […]
January 8, 2025
New Energy Industry Guidelines Help Protect Night Sky
Protecting the night sky is a collaborative endeavor – one The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory has helped lead in West Texas since the launch of its Dark Skies Initiative in 2010. Now, oil and gas facilities in nearby New Mexico […]
December 13, 2024
Northwestern University Joins Giant Magellan Telescope International Consortium
The University of Texas at Austin joined the Giant Magellan Telescope today in announcing that Northwestern University has joined its international consortium to construct the $2.54 billion observatory. Home to the world-renowned Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) and the newly founded NSF-Simons AI Institute […]
November 20, 2024
Astronomers Discover Youngest Transiting Planet Ever
Today, astronomers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and The University of Texas at Austin announced the discovery of the youngest planet ever found using the transit method. With this method, a planet is detected when it passes between its host […]
November 18, 2024
Pioneering Instrument Returns to McDonald Observatory
After nearly a decade of globetrotting research, a powerful astronomical instrument has returned home to The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory. The Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph (IGRINS) was re-installed on the Observatory’s Harlan J. Smith Telescope on October 17 and […]
October 23, 2024
Frontier Fellows Tackle Humanity’s Biggest Question: Where Do We Come From?
This fall, The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Astronomy welcomes the inaugural class of postdoctoral fellows to its Cosmic Frontier Center. The Frontier Fellows will support the center, which launched earlier this year, in its mission to uncover the origins […]
October 15, 2024
Giant Magellan Telescope Begins Primary Mirror Support System Testing
The Giant Magellan Telescope, of which The University of Texas at Austin is a founding partner, today announced the successful installation of one of its completed 27.6-foot-diameter (8.4-meter-diameter) primary mirrors into a support system prototype at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris […]
October 10, 2024
UT Astronomers Find JWST Data Conflicts with Reionization Models
Reionization is a critical period when the first stars and galaxies changed the physical structure of their surroundings, and eventually the entire universe. Established theories state that this epoch ended around 1 billion years after the Big Bang. However, if […]
October 9, 2024
UT Astronomers Race To Capture Image of Exoplanet Near Star
Planet AF Lep b is a world of firsts. In 2023, it was the lowest-mass planet outside our solar system to be directly observed and have its mass measured using astrometry. This is a technique that charts the subtle movements […]
September 30, 2024
Giant Magellan Telescope Launches Program to Enhance Accessibility in Astronomy Education
The Giant Magellan Telescope, for which The University of Texas in Austin is a founding partner, today announced the launch of Universo Expansivo, a new education program designed to increase accessibility in astronomy education, particularly for students with vision loss, through tactile astronomy […]
September 18, 2024
New AI Institute Led by UT Researchers Will Accelerate Cosmic Discovery
The University of Texas at Austin has been chosen to lead a new institute that harnesses artificial intelligence to explore some of the leading mysteries of the universe, including dark matter and the fundamentals related to the search for life. […]
September 13, 2024
Early Dark Energy Could Resolve Cosmology’s Two Biggest Puzzles
A new study by physicists at MIT and The University of Texas at Austin tackles two of the biggest puzzles in cosmology. They are the Hubble tension, which refers to a mismatch in measurements of how fast the universe is expanding; and observations of […]
August 26, 2024
Early Galaxies Weren’t Too Big for Their Britches After All
When astronomers got their first glimpses of galaxies in the early universe from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, they were expecting to find galactic pipsqueaks, but instead they found what appeared to be a bevy of Olympic bodybuilders. Some galaxies […]
August 25, 2024
Observatory Remembers Harlan J. Smith on His 100th Birthday
On August 25, McDonald Observatory commemorates what would have been the 100th birthday of Harlan James Smith. He was the Observatory’s director from 1963 to 1989, a period of lasting impact on the site’s facilities, public outreach programs, and place […]