Board of Visitors Winter Meeting Shares Astronomy Highlights

The 2025 Board of Visitors Winter Meeting took place February 28 and March 1 on The University of Texas at Austin campus. Over 140 members and guests joined us for a reception at the Texas Science & Natural History Museum, the latest news from UT and BOV leadership, and a showcase of the pioneering work underway at the Department of Astronomy and McDonald Observatory.

Science talks explored:

• The science behind McDonald Observatory’s award-winning education programs
• The search for elusive brown dwarfs using the James Webb Space Telescope
• The identification of white dwarfs whose cores are crystalizing using McDonald Observatory’s Otto Struve Telescope
• The study and evolution of planets outside of our solar system

Thank you to all who attended. It was a pleasure to connect with so many of you.

Science Talks

Teaching and Education Best Practices, Highlights, and Impacts of McDonald Observatory and the Department of Astronomy

Keely Finkelstein, Astronomy Department Associate Chair and Associate Professor of Instruction

“We are scientists. We can use the framework of the scientific process and apply it to our teaching.”

Education and teaching have always been part of McDonald Observatory and the Department of Astronomy’s mission. In her talk, Finkelstein shared the important role of the Observatory in educating UT Austin students, as well as K-12 teachers and their classrooms. Using the Observatory’s teacher workshops as an example, Finkelstein shared the science behind how courses are designed – from identifying overarching goals, to creating engaging activities, and assessing success. Since these workshops launched in 2001, over 2,100 teachers have attended, impacting an estimated one million or more students.

Probing the Limit of the Star Formation Process with JWST

Matthew De Furio, Postdoctoral Fellow

“The universe makes a lot more 10 Jupiter-mass things than five Jupiter-mass things, and a lot more five Jupiter-mass things than three Jupiter-mass things.”

The Flame Nebula, located 1,400 light-years away from Earth, is a hotbed of star formation. The processes driving stellar birth also create “failed stars” that are so small their cores will never fuse hydrogen like their full-fledged siblings. These are brown dwarfs. Because they cool into very dim and cool objects, only young brown dwarfs are reasonably visible to telescopes. However, the dense dust and gas surrounding them at birth make these objects difficult to view. De Furio shared his research using the James Webb Space Telescope to explore the Flame Nebula and find an abundance of brown dwarfs. JWST is able to view such objects down to half the mass of Jupiter; however, the smallest found were roughly two to three Jupiter-masses. This may be the smallest size possible for brown dwarfs.

Read about De Furio’s work, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal on March 10. His BOV talk offered a sneak peek of this research.

Uncovering Earth-Sized Diamonds with the Otto Struve Telescope

Malia Kao, Ph.D. Student

“We all know that the universe is very old, and that the Milky Way is very old. But how do we know their ages?”

White dwarfs are the final stage of life for most stars, including our Sun. After expanding into a red giant and blowing off their atmospheres, these stars contract into a dense core that slowly cools over time. Because of this, scientists can calculate a white dwarf’s age based on its temperature – and from that calculate the age of our galaxy. However, as the stars cool, their cores start to crystallize (into massive diamonds!), releasing extra heat and making them seem younger than they really are. To better understand this process, Kao used a technique called asteroseismology to study star vibrations and identify those with crystallizing interiors. Using McDonald Observatory’s Otto Struve Telescope for over 150 nights of observing, Kao found a significant number of these stars, growing the catalogue of known “crystallizing pulsators” from seven to 24. With these, astronomers will be able to better understand how stars evolve and refine their estimates of the Milky Way’s age.

The Great Lecture: The Evolution of Planetary Systems Across Time and Space

Adam Kraus, Professor

“We can track these stories from the prologue of star and planet formation to the final chapter of planetary systems after five billion years.”

While planetary systems are common throughout the universe, many of them look very different from our own. Kraus shared how researchers use an array of instruments – in particular, the Kepler, TESS, and Gaia space telescopes and the Habitable-zone Planet Finder at McDonald Observatory – to identify and learn about planets outside of our solar systems. This has expanded our understanding of young planets’ atmospheres (which may remain “puffed up” for a billion years after formation) and how they interact with their host stars (migrating quickly inward). In 2024, Kraus helped identify the youngest planet yet found using the transit method, which detects a planet when it travels between the host star and observer. This accomplishment was made possible thanks to an unexpected geometry, with the planet orbiting outside of the system’s disk of debris, gas, and dust, rather than within it.

Kraus added that binary star systems offer a unique opportunity to learn about planetary systems. That’s because they provide examples of how different variables within a similar environment can give rise to distinctly different planets. In the future, Kraus hopes to learn more about how binary stars, supernovae, stellar flybys, and other factors affect planetary evolution.

Watch the 2025 Great Lecture in Astronomy.