astronomy

Exhaustive emissions modeling by global physicists narrows down particle candidates

Using three observatories on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi, astronomers at the University of Arizona have discovered the second-most distant quasar ever found. As part of an international effort to confirm and study the newly discovered object, a team at UCI and UC Santa Barbara used the Keck II 10-meter telescope to perform a spectroscopic analysis. The […]

Findings may change fundamental thinking about star system formation, dynamics

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 […]