The Flame Nebula, located about 1,400 light-years away from Earth, is a hotbed of star formation less than 1 million years old. Within it, there are objects so small that their cores will never be able to fuse hydrogen like full-fledged stars — brown dwarfs. Astronomers have long debated how small brown dwarfs can be. Now, a new study sheds light on this question by finding the lowest mass brown dwarfs yet.

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.

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 dots are quite abundant, researchers are perplexed by their nature, the reason for their unique colors, and what they convey about the early universe.

BY EMILY HOWARD

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 are joining the effort, with help from a new set of lighting guidelines tailored to their industry.

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. 

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 star and the observer. The planet, named TIDYE-1b, is roughly the size of Jupiter and is an estimated 3 million years old.

BY EMILY HOWARD

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 expects to start scientific operations on December 10.

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 of galaxies in the universe through a combination of theoretical and observational astrophysics.

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 Mirror Lab.

BY EMILY HOWARD