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
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 of a host star over many years to gain insights about orbiting companions, including planets.
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 kits and accompanying lesson plans.
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. Housed in UT’s Oden Institute for Computational Sciences and Engineering, the NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins will be funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Simons Foundation.
