Using the Habitable Zone Planet Finder instrument, a team of scientists – including UCI astronomer Paul Robertson – has confirmed that an object previously detected by the Kepler space telescope is an exoplanet, a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system. The team’s findings were published recently in The Astronomical Journal. Called G 9-40b, […]
An international team of astronomers, including a researcher from UCI’s Department of Physics & Astronomy, has found an ultramassive galaxy as it existed more than 12 billion years ago. Galaxy XMM-2599 was extremely productive early on – hatching more than 300 billion suns by the time the universe had its 1 billionth birthday (it’s now […]
UCI astronomer Paul Robertson recently celebrated “first light” for NEID, a new exoplanet hunting instrument he helped develop. Installed at the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, NEID is an extremely precise radial velocity spectrometer. Its initial observations were of 51 Pegasi, a sunlike star that, in 1995, was […]
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument aimed its robotic array of 5,000 fiber-optic eyes at the night sky for the first time recently to capture images showing its unique view of galaxy light. Mounted on a telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, DESI was designed to explore the mystery of dark energy, which […]
UCI has posted a new podcast episode featuring an interview with the recently appointed dean of the School of Physical Sciences, James Bullock. Arriving at UCI in 2004, Bullock established a reputation as a leading researcher in astronomy and cosmology. He served as chair of the Department of Physics & Astronomy prior to being named […]
Astronomers at UCI and Texas A&M University have obtained the most detailed view yet of an inner cold gas disk around a distant supermassive black hole. Studying the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 3258 with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array – a powerful radio telescope array in the high desert of northern Chile – the scientists […]
Using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, UCI astronomers have identified a galaxy with an unexpectedly high amount of dark matter at its core. Descended from a family of galaxies called “red nuggets” that formed relatively soon after the Big Bang but were stalled in their growth about 10 billion years ago, Markarian 1216 has […]
A new episode of The UCI Podcast featuring interviews with two UCI faculty members is now available. The first segment is a conversation on the history of video games through the lens of LGBTQ theory with Bonnie “Bo” Ruberg, assistant professor of informatics. Ruberg’s new book, Video Games Have Always Been Queer, is on shelves […]
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, visiting professor at the University of Oxford and chancellor of Scotland’s University of Dundee, enthralled a capacity audience in the Irvine Barclay Theatre on the UCI campus Tuesday night as she delivered the 2019 Reines Lecture. Bell Burnell, named dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2007, recounted […]
Effectiveness of tool is demonstrated on recent super-Earth discovery at Barnard’s star