STIC Chair University of Southern California James Bullock is the 23rd dean of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. He holds the Anna H. Bing Dean’s Chair and a faculty appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Before joining USC in 2025, Bullock was Dean of the School of Physical Sciences at […]
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Using a combination of telescopes, including the International Gemini Observatory, funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, and the SOAR telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF NOIRLab, astronomers have characterized the closest supernova linked to a fast X-ray transient. The observations reveal that these bright blasts of X-rays may be the result of a ‘failed’ explosive death of a massive star.
University of California, Santa Cruz George Blumenthal is Chancellor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His Ph.D. degree is from UC San Diego, and his research interests include theoretical cosmology, the theory of cold dark matter, and active galactic nuclei. He was the chair of the […]
University of California Santa Cruz Raja GuhaThakurta is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz, He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, completed postdoctoral stints at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University, and was an Assistant Astronomer at Space Telescope Science Institute, before joining the UCSC […]
KLO International Dr. Olsen earned her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at UC-Irvine and did Postdoctoral research at Harvard-Children’s Hospital before becoming an Asst. Professor at SUNY-Stony Brook. She served over 20 years in the federal government in variety scientific leadership positions beginning as program officer at NSF, and then moved to a Senator’s Office who was a member of the […]
Johns Hopkins University Timothy M. Heckman is the Dr. A. Hermann Pfund Professor in the William H. Miller III Department of Physics & Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. He was the department Chair from 2015 to 2022. Heckman has served as a member of the NAS Committee on Astronomy & Astrophysics and the Board on […]
Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have captured compelling evidence of a planet with a mass similar to Saturn orbiting the young nearby star TWA 7. If confirmed, this would represent Webb’s first direct image discovery of a planet, and the lightest planet ever seen with this technique outside the solar system.
The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a major new scientific facility jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, released its first imagery today at an event in Washington, D.C. The imagery shows cosmic phenomena captured at an unprecedented scale. In just over 10 hours of test observations, NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory has already captured millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars and thousands of asteroids. The imagery is a small preview of Rubin Observatory’s upcoming 10-year scientific mission to explore and understand some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.
We invite you to attend the live stream of NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s First Look event, taking place on 23 June 2025 at 11:00 a.m. EDT. At this international celebration the Rubin Observatory team will unveil the observatory’s first spectacular images. The event will be live streamed via YouTube in English and Spanish. Links to the live streams will be made available on rubinobservatory.org.
A team of solar physicists has released a new study shedding light on the fine-scale structure of the Sun’s surface. Using the unparalleled power of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, built and operated by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO) on Maui, scientists have observed, for the first time ever in such high detail, ultra-narrow bright and dark stripes on the solar photosphere, offering unprecedented insight into how magnetic fields shape solar surface dynamics at scales as small as 20 kilometers (or 12.4 miles).
As far back as 1912, astronomers realized that the Andromeda galaxy — then thought to be only a nebula — was headed our way. A century later, astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope were able to measure the sideways motion of Andromeda and found it was so negligible that an eventual head-on collision with the Milky Way seemed almost certain.
The Sun’s corona—the outermost layer of its atmosphere, visible only during a total solar eclipse—has long intrigued scientists due to its extreme temperatures, violent eruptions, and large prominences. However, turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere has caused image blur and hindered observations of the corona. A ground-breaking recent development by scientists from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Solar Observatory (NSO), and New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), is changing that by using adaptive optics to remove the blur.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured new details of the auroras on our solar system’s largest planet. The dancing lights observed on Jupiter are hundreds of times brighter than those seen on Earth. With Webb’s advanced sensitivity, astronomers have studied the phenomena to better understand Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
Lurking 600 million light-years away, within the inky black depths between stars, there is an invisible monster gulping down any wayward star that plummets toward it. The sneaky black hole betrayed its presence in a newly identified tidal disruption event (TDE) where a hapless star was ripped apart and swallowed in a spectacular burst of radiation. These disruption events are powerful probes of black hole physics, revealing the conditions necessary for launching jets and winds when a black hole is in the midst of consuming a star, and are seen as bright objects by telescopes.
In celebration of the Hubble Space Telescope’s 35 years in Earth orbit, NASA is releasing an assortment of compelling images recently taken by Hubble, stretching from the planet Mars to star-forming regions, and a neighboring galaxy.
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