Pasadena, Calif. — The Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) today announced that Arizona State University (ASU) has joined the mission to build the world’s largest telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). The University of Texas at Austin is a founding partner of GMTO, and welcomes our colleagues from Arizona State to the organization.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch in 2019. Steven Finkelstein leads one of the chosen Early Release Science projects as principal investigator, and several other UT astronomers play important roles in other Webb projects.
AUSTIN, Texas — NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is expected to launch in 2019 after decades of development. Now the agency has announced the scientists who will use the $8 billion telescope first, testing its instruments to prove it’s in good working order. Steven Finkelstein, an associate professor of astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, leads one of the chosen Early Release Science projects as principal investigator.
A Hubble Space Telescope view of the field that CEERS will survey. This field has been imaged by several surveys with Hubble, including AEGIS and CANDELS. A larger version (133Mb) of this image is available; click here to access. (Credit: Anton Koekemoer/STScI)
Pasadena, Calif. — The next generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V), directed by Juna Kollmeier of the Carnegie Institution for Science, will move forward with mapping the entire sky following a $16 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The grant will kickstart a groundbreaking all-sky spectroscopic survey for a next wave of discovery, anticipated to start in 2020.
Voices reverberating off mountains and the sound of footsteps bouncing off walls are examples of an echo. Echoes happen when sound waves ricochet off surfaces and return to the listener.
Space has its own version of an echo. It’s not made with sound but with light, and occurs when light bounces off dust clouds.
UT Austin and its partners in the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization are beginning to cast the fifth of seven enormous mirrors for GMT.
TUCSON, Ariz. — Today, The University of Texas at Austin and its partners in the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) are beginning to cast the fifth of seven mirrors that will form the heart of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). The mirror is being cast at The University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory, a facility known for creating the world’s largest mirrors for astronomy. The 25-meter diameter GMT will be located in the Chilean Andes and will study planets around other stars and to look back to the time when the first galaxies formed.
Astronomers from UT Austin and elsewhere have spotted the dusty tails of six exocomets — comets outside our solar system — orbiting a faint star 800 light years from Earth.
AUSTIN — Astronomers from The University of Texas at Austin, working with scientists from other institutions and amateur astronomers, have spotted the dusty tails of six exocomets — comets outside our solar system — orbiting a faint star 800 light years from Earth.
These cosmic balls of ice and dust, which were about the size of Halley’s comet and traveled about 100,000 miles per hour before they ultimately vaporized, are some of the smallest objects yet found outside our own solar system.
