A team of scientists including The University of Texas at Austin’s Dr. William Cochran has discovered a solar system similar to our own dating back to the dawn of our Milky Way galaxy. They are reporting the find of five planets with sizes between Mercury and Venus orbiting the Sun-like star Kepler-444 in today’s issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
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A five-year analysis of an event captured by a tiny telescope at McDonald Observatory and followed up by telescopes on the ground and in space has led astronomers to believe they witnessed a giant black hole tear apart a star. The work is published this month in The Astrophysical Journal.
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Take a trip out to Fort Davis, under some of the darkest skies in North America, and meet the telescopes that are making astronomical history. Learn more at McDonald Observatory's website. Video by Jeff Mertz.
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The University of Texas System Board...
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Astronomer Taft Armandroff has been appointed the new director of the College of Natural Sciences McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas.
University of Texas at Austin astronomer Steven Finkelstein has led a team that has discovered and measured the distance to the most distant galaxy ever found. The galaxy is seen as it was at a time just 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The unusual black hole makes up 14 percent of its galaxy's mass, rather than the usual 0.1 percent, and lies 220 million light-years away in the constellation Perseus.
Astronomer J. Craig Wheeler has a new idea on the identity of the "parents" of one of the most important types of supernovae in the universe.
With its role in the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope, the McDonald Observatory continues to push forward the frontiers of astronomical science.
The discovery of the Tattooine-like system proves that whole planetary systems can form in a disk around a binary star.
The white dwarf stars are so close together that they make a complete orbit in less than 13 minutes.
Astronomer Don Winget is making white dwarf "star stuff" here on Earth.
A brief history of the McDonald Observatory and the National Science Foundation.
A Jupiter-size planet in a nearby solar system is dissolving because of interactions with its parent star.
George Miller, astronomy senior and Dean’s Scholar in the College of Natural Sciences, has won the $20,000 grand prize in the University Co-operative Society’s George H. Mitchell Awards for Academic Excellence.
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