News: McDonald Observatory

Read the latest news from the College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin

McDonald Observatory

Pioneering Instrument Returns to McDonald Observatory

The Immersion Grating Infrared Spectrograph (IGRINS) splits infrared light into more individual wavelengths than a traditional spectrograph.

Illustration of the IGRINS instrument

Announcements

Frontier Fellows Tackle Humanity’s Biggest Question: Where Do We Come From?

The inaugural class of Cosmic Frontier Center postdoctoral fellows will study black holes in early galaxies and the formation of the first stars.

A spiral galaxy

Announcements

Giant Magellan Telescope Begins Primary Mirror Support System Testing

The milestone marks the start of a six-month optical testing phase at the University of Arizona.

A large telescope mirror hovers over a support system prototype for lab tests

Research

UT Astronomers Find JWST Data Conflicts with Reionization Models

Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope spawned a new tension around when a major change in the universe happened.

An abstract pattern of blue, purple and black areas represents the output of a computer simulation of galaxies ionizing hydrogen gas during the epoch of Reionization

UT News

UT Astronomers Race To Capture Image of Exoplanet Near Star

Brendan Bowler was part of a team to help find the lowest-mass/closest-to-its-host-star distant planet ever found.

An astronomical digitialized sky survey shows stellar patches with various levels of brightness. In a pull-out nearby, a circle is labeled JWST, with a brightest section labeled AF Lep b near a host star. Comparison lines nearby indicate how the Jupiter-Sun Distance and Earth-Sun distance compare.

Announcements

Texas Science & Natural History Museum Celebrates Record Attendance in its First Year Since Reopening

The on-campus museum also has opened its newest temporary exhibit, featuring a scale model of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the largest optical telescope in North America.

A dark room has museum-quality installations on its wall that read, "Big Eye on Dark Skies: Hobby-Eberly Telescope" near a 3D spherical telescope replica.

Announcements

New Program to Enhance Accessibility in Astronomy Education

Universo Expansivo, a program of the Giant Magellan Telescope, will increase accessibility for students with vision loss through tactile astronomy kits and lesson plans.

Several small models of planets sit on a desk next to a window

Announcements

New AI Institute Led by UT Researchers Will Accelerate Cosmic Discovery

Stella Offner and Arya Farahi are among the leads of a new multi-institution institute focused on AI and astronomy.

Four quadrants of scientific-images come together, with webs showing bright spots for star formation, galaxy clustering, identifications of galaxies that are labeled and a futuristic network.

McDonald Observatory

Early Dark Energy Could Resolve Cosmology’s Two Biggest Puzzles

Michael Boylan-Kolchin and others show “early dark energy” might help solve the Hubble Tension and explain why there are more early galaxies than expected.

Views of the early universe from a computer model

Research

Early Galaxies Weren’t Too Big for Their Britches After All

It got called the crisis in cosmology. But now astronomers can explain some surprising recent discoveries.

In the blackness of space, a bright object in the center of view is surrounded and partly obscured by a dark cloud