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.
A new study by physicists at MIT and The University of Texas at Austin tackles two of the biggest puzzles in cosmology. They are the Hubble tension, which refers to a mismatch in measurements of how fast the universe is expanding; and observations of numerous early, bright galaxies at a time when the early universe should have been much less populated.
When astronomers got their first glimpses of galaxies in the early universe from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, they were expecting to find galactic pipsqueaks, but instead they found what appeared to be a bevy of Olympic bodybuilders. Some galaxies appeared to have grown so massive, so quickly, that simulations could not account for them.
On August 25, McDonald Observatory commemorates what would have been the 100th birthday of Harlan James Smith. He was the Observatory’s director from 1963 to 1989, a period of lasting impact on the site’s facilities, public outreach programs, and place within the greater astronomy community.
