KEYWORD

telescopes

Exoplanet hunting instrument created in part by UCI astronomer makes first observations

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 […]

UCI astronomers help implement new sky surveying tool to shed light on dark energy

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 […]

Astronomers from UCI and Texas A&M peer into distant black hole’s ‘sphere of influence’

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 […]

The UCI Podcast: New episode explores the history of video games, hunt for exoplanets

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 […]

Astronomers from UCI, other institutions use new technique to find extrasolar planets

Effectiveness of tool is demonstrated on recent super-Earth discovery at Barnard’s star