Michigan State University Donahue grew up on a farm near Inland, Nebraska, a town of about sixty people. Her undergraduate physics S.B. degree is from MIT (1985) and her astrophysics Ph.D. is from the University of Colorado, Boulder (1990). Her post-doctoral research in observational astronomy was completed at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of […]
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AURA President (ex officio) Matt Mountain, President of AURA since 2015, is the Telescope Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and a member of the JWST Science Working Group. Previously, he was Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute and prior to that led the construction of and directed Gemini Observatory. He received […]
AMCR Chair Fermilab Dr. Brenna Flaugher is a Distinguished Scientist Emeritus at Fermilab, retired in May 2024. She started her career in particle physics on the Collider Detector at Fermilab Experiment. From 2003-2012 she was the project manager and scientific lead of the Dark Energy Survey Camera construction project and was awarded an American Physical […]
New Mexico State University James McAteer PhD is Deputy Provost and Professor of Astronomy at New Mexico State University. His service is in academic oversight, student success, and faculty excellence, building relationships among faculty, staff, students, and leadership. As Chair of Astronomy McAteer performed financial management over Apache Point Observatory, and as Director of Sunspot […]
LIGO Laboratory California Institute of Technology David Reitze is the Executive Director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory at Caltech and Research Professor at the California Institute of Technology. Prior to that, he spent almost 20 years on the faculty of the University of Florida in the Physics Department. His research focuses on […]
NMOC Chair Hunter College, City University of New York Professor Kelle Cruz is an astronomer who earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and the American Museum of Natural History. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY, and […]
AURA Board Chair University of Toledo Karen Bjorkman received a B.S. in Physics from Univ. North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Univ. Colorado, Boulder. She was a staff scientist at Univ. Wisconsin, Madison for 7 years before moving to Univ. of Toledo, where she rose through the faculty ranks. There […]
University of Oxford Roger Davies started his research in Cambridge and spent 6 years at NOAO in Tucson, Arizona. He worked out a new way of measuring the distances to galaxies and discovered the “Great Attractor”, a huge concentration of galaxy clusters in the southern sky. He moved to Oxford in 1988 to lead the […]
Carnegie Science and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile Leopoldo Infante is a staff scientist at Carnegie Science and a full professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC). He earned his physics degree at PUC and his PhD at the University of Victoria, Canada. Infante directs Las Campanas Observatory and founded multiple astrophysics programs […]
AURA Board Vice-Chair, SOC Chair University of Colorado, Boulder Dr. Emily CoBabe-Ammann is the Senior Advisor and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Colorado, serving as the Chief Research Strategist to develop new research directions that align with national interests and priorities. She is currently the Acting Executive Associate Director for […]
University of Texas Daniel Jaffe is the Vice President for Research and Jane and Roland Blumberg Professor in the Department of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin. As Vice President, he oversees the University’s research infrastructure and several of its interdisciplinary centers and institutes including the Applied Research Laboratory, the Oden Institute, the […]
The Dark Energy Camera captures an image of the dazzling Coma Cluster, named after the hair of Queen Berenice II of Egypt. Not only significant in Greek mythology, this collection of galaxies was also fundamental to the discovery of the existence of dark matter. The theory emerged in 1937 when Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky noticed that the Coma Cluster galaxies behaved as if they were under the influence of vast amounts of unobservable ‘dark’ matter.
Made famous in 1995 by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Pillars of Creation in the heart of the Eagle Nebula have captured imaginations worldwide with their arresting, ethereal beauty.
A festive array of bright pinks and blues makes for a remarkable sight in this image captured with the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory. Resembling a cloud of cosmic confetti, this image is being released in celebration of Gemini North’s 25th anniversary. NGC 4449 is a prime example of starburst activity caused by the interacting and mingling of galaxies as it slowly absorbs its smaller galactic neighbors.
Since the very first instant after the Big Bang the Universe has been expanding. This means that the early Universe was considerably smaller and early-formed galaxies were more likely to interact and merge. Galaxy mergers fuel the formation of quasars — extremely luminous galactic cores where gas and dust falling into a central supermassive black hole emit enormous amounts of light. So when looking back at the early Universe astronomers would expect to find numerous pairs of quasars in close proximity to each other as their host galaxies undergo mergers. However, they have been surprised to find exactly none — until now.
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