UC Santa Cruz Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics

Join us for Astronomy on Tap at Humble Sea Brewery on Thursday, June 15th at 6:30pm!

Join us for Astronomy on Tap on May 18th at 6:30pm at Humble Sea! See you there!

Join us for this exciting event on April 17th at the Rio Theater!

On Monday, April 17, at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz will host the Whispers from Other Worlds event -- a lecture & discussion on NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration's search for life in the cosmos.

The event will feature Thomas Zurbuchen, Retired Director of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, and Nadia Drake, Science Journalist. The presentation will first frame the discussion of looking for extraterrestrial life in the context of the famed 1961 Drake equation, and then cover the ways in which NASA’s Science program focuses on identifying signatures of life elsewhere in the universe.

Join us for this free event, sponsored by the UCSC Astrobiology and Science Communication programs.

Date: Monday, April 17, 2023
Time: 6:30 – 8 PM
Location: The Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Dr., Santa Cruz CA

RSVP here: bit.ly/whispers-event

Join us for Astronomy on Tap at Humble Sea on Thursday April 20th at 6:30pm!

Congratulations to UCSC grad Yuting Feng for this amazing discovery!

Astronomers find the most distant stars in our galaxy halfway to Andromeda A search for variable stars called RR Lyrae has found some of the most distant stars in the Milky Way’s halo a million light years away.

Natalie Batalha, professor of astronomy and astrophysics and director of astrobiology at UC Santa Cruz and leader of the NASA Interdisciplinary Consortium for Astrobiology Research, presented her team’s initial scientific findings from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to the space and aeronautics subcommittee on Nov. 16 during a hearing titled, “Unfolding the Universe: Initial science results from the James Webb Space Telescope.”

Batalha testifies at Congressional hearing on the initial scientific findings of the JWST The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest and most powerful telescope humans have sent to space and, Batalha asserts, it is ushering in a new era of exoplanet science.

Congratulations to UCSC Astronomy & Astrophysics PhD students Rosa Wallace Everson and Joey Murphy for receiving ARCS scholarships in 2022!

The ARCS Foundation is a national organization that provides scholarships and fellowships for the country's most promising science, medical, and engineering students. Well done, both of you!

ARCS Foundation scholarships support UCSC graduate students Sixteen UC Santa Cruz graduate students have received scholarships worth a total of $160,000 from the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation for the 2022-23 academic year.

New astronomy network catalyzes scientific excellence A new STEM mentoring network seeks to maximize scientific excellence and output within the astronomy and astrophysics community by cultivating inclusive environments where people with marginalized identities can thrive.

Congratulations to Prof. Kevin Bundy and Prof. Holger Schmidt! They have recently won an NSF grant that will allow them to pursue emerging technology of making spectrometers on a chip – tiny devices for separating and measuring light at ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths to to study the properties of objects in the sky, including their composition and distance. Follow the link to learn more.

Collaboration between engineering and astrophysics will develop cutting-edge spectrometers-on-a-chip Two researchers have won an NSF grant that will allow them to pursue the emerging technology of spectrometers on a chip – tiny devices for separating and measuring light at ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths which can enable advances in astronomy when used as part of telescope instrume...

Congratulations Dr. Ari Murguia-Berthier! What an incredible honor.

Astronomer Ariadna Murguia-Berthier wins 2022 Trumpler Award for Ph.D. thesis The Astronomical Society of the Pacific is honoring Murguia-Berthier for the research she completed as a graduate student in astronomy at UC Santa Cruz.

For the first time, astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of an exoplanet. Congratulations to Dr. Aarynn Carter & Prof. Andy Skemer who led the analysis of the image data.

The other UC Santa Cruz astronomers involved in this work include Brittany Miles, Prof. Jonathan Fortney, Prof. Bruce Macintosh, Sagnick Mukherjee, and Callie Hood, as well as Prof. Xi Xhang in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

NASA releases Webb telescope's first exoplanet image UCSC astronomers led the analysis of the first exoplanet images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.