News

Awarded since 1955 to the brightest young scientists across the United States and Canada, the two-year Sloan Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers.

The American Astronomical Society has awarded the prestigious Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy to Maya Fishbach for her “major contributions to the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics and cosmology, including inference of the black-hole merger rate and its implications for the formation of stellar-mass black holes, their host galaxies, and the expansion history of the universe.” Fishbach is known for performing the first “dark standard siren” measurement of the Hubble constant with gravitational waves and a galaxy catalog (Fishbach et al. 2019); discovering a gravitational-wave signature of pair-instability supernovae (Fishbach & Holz 2017); proposing the use of black hole spins to distinguish whether black holes grow from previous mergers (Fishbach, Holz & Farr 20177a); and measuring the redshift evolution of the black hole merger rate for the first time (Fishbach, Holz & Farr 2018).
 
The Annie Jump Cannon Award is given every year for outstanding research and promise for future research to a North American female astronomer within five years of receiving her PhD.

Teniola Ajagbe, a KICP Space Explorers Alum, is headed to Northwestern University as a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering major. She was featured on the local news and credits the Space Explorers program with helping her discover what she wants to do with her career.

On January 3, 2025, the Biden White House presented 23 individuals and 2 organizations with the National Medals of Science and National Medals of Technology and Innovation.

UChicago cosmologist recognized for pioneering work on Hubble constant measurements

Analysis of cosmic microwave background reinforces Hubble constant measurement

The APS Fellowship Program was created to recognize members who may have made advances in physics through original research and publication, or made significant innovative contributions in the application of physics to science and technology. They may also have made significant contributions to the teaching of physics or service and participation in the activities of the Society.

SkAI Institute will develop AI tools and accelerate astronomy’s data-driven revolution

UChicago-led analysis measures universe expansion rate, finds there may not be a ‘Hubble tension’
We know many things about our universe, but astronomers are still debating exactly how fast it is expanding. In fact, over the past two decades, two major ways to measure this number—known as the “Hubble constant” —have come up with different answers, leading some to wonder if there was something missing from our model of how the universe works.

The field of cosmology is just the small matter of understanding the entire universe: how it began, how it works, and how it’s changing. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) at the University of Chicago, which brings together theoretical and experimental astronomers and physicists to investigate these expansive questions within the University’s distinctly interdisciplinary culture.  

Astronomy & Astrophysics and KICP Professor and FNAL Senior Scientist Dan Hooper has been selected as the new director of the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC). 

Congratulations to Elyssa Brooks for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation on "Developments of Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors".

Every now and then, tiny particles of antimatter strike Earth from cosmic parts unknown. A new balloon-borne experiment launching this spring may at last find their source.

CCAPP is proud to announce Abigail Lee (U. Chicago) and Hanjue Zhu (U. Chicago) as the winners of the 2024 Price Prize in Cosmology and Astrophysics

Prof. Freedman is a Canadian-American cosmologist at the University of Chicago who works in the area of refining measurement of the Hubble Constant. She is renowned for her work on Cepheid variable stars through a Hubble Space Telescope Key Project. Her work and accomplishments are closely connected to the big-bang theory of Georges Lemaître.