The American Astronomical Society (AAS), the major organization of professional astronomers in North America, has honored Dr. Anita Cochran, Assistant Director of McDonald Observatory and Senior Research Scientist, for extraordinary achievement and service by naming her an AAS Fellow for 2021.

Cochran was honored for her research addressing the molecular composition and structure of comets and her decades of service to the astronomical community.

FORT DAVIS, Texas — Three years into its quest to reveal the nature of dark energy, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) is on track to complete the largest map of the cosmos ever. The team will create a three-dimensional map of 2.5 million galaxies that will help astronomers understand how and why the expansion of the universe is speeding up over time.

New Science Driver is Study of Universe’s First Stars

AUSTIN — A group of astronomers from The University of Texas at Austin has found that a telescope idea shelved by NASA a decade ago can solve a problem that no other telescope can: It would be able to study the first stars in the universe. The team, led by NASA Hubble Fellow Anna Schauer, will publish their results in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

AUSTIN, Texas — An international team of astronomers has used NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and retired Spitzer Space Telescope to discover what may be the first intact planet found closely orbiting a white dwarf, the dense leftover of a sun-like star only 40% larger than Earth. The work, led by Andrew Vanderburg of The University of Texas at Austin, included follow-up observations with the 10-meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the university’s McDonald Observatory.

The GMTO Corporation has received a $17.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to accelerate the prototyping and testing of some of the most powerful optical and infrared technologies ever engineered. These crucial advancements for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), of which The University of Texas at Austin is a founding partner, will allow astronomers to see farther into space with more detail than any other optical telescope before.

FORT DAVIS, Texas — The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory is planning to reopen to the public, in a limited fashion, on Friday, Aug. 28. Beginning with a star party that night, the observatory’s Frank N. Bash Visitors Center will begin holding public programs again.

A team of astronomers including McDonald Observatory’s Bill Cochran have made a detailed study of a young planet slightly smaller than Neptune with the Habitable-zone Planet Finder at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory. They characterized the planet’s mass, radius, and the tilt of its orbit. This work provides insight into how such planets form and evolve, and has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal.

An international team of astronomers including Stella Offner of The University of Texas at Austin has proposed a new method for the formation of aluminum-26 in star systems that are forming planets. Because its radioactive decay is thought to provide a heat source for the building blocks of planets, called planetesimals, it’s important for astronomers to know where aluminum-26 comes from. Their research is published in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

McDonald Observatory operated the only large optical telescope in the world that stayed online through the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, keeping watch under the skies.

Text courtesy NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Jupiter-size planets orbiting close to their stars have upended ideas about how giant planets form. Finding young members of this planet class could help answer key questions. For most of human history our understanding of how planets form and evolve was based on the eight (or nine) planets in our solar system. But over the last 25 years, the discovery of more than 4,000 exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, changed all that.