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May 30 Livestream: NASA’s Artemis II Mission

On May 30 at 8:00 p.m., join us for a discussion with Jim Withrow, who works on NASA's Orion class spacecraft, central to the recent 10-day Artemis II flight test to the Moon. This special program will be livestreamed on McDonald Observatory's YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram channels.

Black Hole Found that Formed Before Its Galaxy

Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? For decades, the standard response has been that we don’t really know. Now, researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, including several from UT Austin, have detected clear observational evidence that some supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning, forming without going through a stellar collapse phase, and without a significantly more massive host galaxy to feed them.

IGRINS Confirms Link Between the Composition of Exoplanets and Their Stars

Using the high-resolution Immersion GRating INfrared Spectrograph (IGRINS), astronomers were able to simultaneously quantify the magnesium and silicon content of the exoplanet’s atmosphere. This is the first time such a measurement has been made. And with it, astronomers have found that the planet WASP-189b shares the same magnesium-to-silicon ratio as its host star, providing the first observational evidence of a widely adopted assumption about planet formation.

A Night at the Telescope

A group of astronomy undergraduate students from the University of Texas at Austin is invited to “test drive” the 107 inch Harlan J. Smith telescope at the McDonald Observatory. As Harlan J. Smith Scholars, the students are tasked with investigating a distant globular cluster and determining whether it may contain a black hole.

Help Renovate Our Visitors Center - Gifts Being Matched!

As our Frank N. Bash Visitors Center enters its third decade in service, we’ve started an extensive renovation of its public spaces. You are invited to be part of this transformative project by contributing to its funding. All gifts are currently being matched by sponsors!