FORT DAVIS, TEXAS — A $257,000 gift to The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory from Apache Corporation will fund the observatory’s ongoing efforts to preserve the dark West Texas skies that make research possible and provide unsurpassed views of the universe to visitors.
StarDate Radio is announcing today that Billy Henry is the program’s new voice. Henry, an Austin-based voice talent, musician, composer, and college lecturer, becomes the third narrator of the program in its 41-year history. He assumes the title from Sandy Wood, who retired from the program yesterday. Henry’s first program airs today.
Sandy Wood, the popular and charismatic announcer of the StarDate radio program, is retiring after 28 years on the air. Her final episode will air July 16.
StarDate is the longest running nationally syndicated science program on American radio. Produced by The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory, the program began in 1978. It brings a daily two-minute message of astronomy and skywatching to 2.3 million weekly listeners via more than 300 stations across the country. Wood took over from original announcer Joel Block after the program’s first dozen years.
St. Louis — CI Tau b is a paradoxical planet, but new research about its mass, brightness and the carbon monoxide in its atmosphere is starting to answer questions about how a planet so large could have formed around a star that’s only 2 million years old.
Austin philanthropist David Booth commits leadership gift toward Texas Science and the Giant Magellan Telescope
AUSTIN, Texas — The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory is celebrating its 80th anniversary, and it started today with an event at the Capitol. Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 60, authored by Texas state Sen. José Rodríguez to honor the anniversary, passed this morning on the Senate floor. Texas state Rep. Poncho Nevárez will sponsor the resolution in the House.
AUSTIN, Texas — Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with Google, have used artificial intelligence (AI) to uncover two more hidden planets in the Kepler space telescope archive. The technique shows promise for identifying many additional planets that traditional methods could not catch.
The planets discovered this time were from Kepler’s extended mission, called K2.
FORT DAVIS, Texas — A new astronomical spectrograph provides the highest precision measurements to date of infrared signals from nearby stars, allowing astronomers to detect planets capable of having liquid water on their surfaces that orbit cool stars outside our solar system. The Habitable Zone Planet Finder (HPF) allows precise measurement of a star’s radial velocity, measured by the subtle change in the color of the star’s spectra as it is tugged by an orbiting planet, which is critical information in the discovery and confirmation of new planets.
AUSTIN, Texas — The first direct evidence of crystallized white dwarf stars has been discovered by an international team of researchers that includes an astronomer at The University of Texas at Austin. Predicted half a century ago, the direct evidence of these stars will be published tomorrow in the journal Nature.
Seattle — The American Astronomical Society (AAS) announced today at its semi-annual meeting in Seattle that J. Craig Wheeler and David Branch will share its Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award for 2019. Wheeler is the Samuel T. and Fern Yanagisawa Regents Professor of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin.
Wheeler and Branch, an emeritus professor at The University of Oklahoma, are the authors of the university-level textbook “Supernova Explosions,” published by Springer in 2017.
