News: Faculty

Hsiao-Wen Chen, KICP senior member and Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics , has been named 2022 American Astronomical Society Fellows. The AAS Fellows program was established in 2019 to recognize AAS members for their contributions toward the Society's mission of enhancing and sharing humanity's scientific understanding of the universe.  

Jeff McMahon and his team have developed new techniques for working with curved lenses instead of flat silicon wafers for CMB telescope lenses.

For Dan Hooper, head of theoretical astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Chicago, solving these questions involves radically rethinking what we think we know about the universe’s very early history.
Interviewed by Richard Webb, Executive Editor, New Scientist at the Royal Institution, London in Feb 2020.

Citation: "Joshua Frieman (Fermilab / University of Chicago): For significant theoretical work on inflationary cosmology and dark energy and for pioneering contributions to optical survey science."

PUEO is a balloon mission designed to launch from Antarctica that will detect signals from ultra-high energy neutrinos, particles that contain valuable clues about the highest energy astrophysical processes, including the creation of black holes and neutron star mergers. Neutrinos travel across the universe undisturbed, carrying information about events billions of light years away. PUEO would be the most sensitive survey of cosmic ultra-high energy neutrinos ever conducted. The principal investigator is Abigail Vieregg of the University of Chicago.

Congratulations to Sam Passaglia for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on "The Black Hole Window on Cosmic Inflation". Sam has accepted a postdoctoral position at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.

Congratulations to Philip Mansfield for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation on "Why Do Dark Matter Halos Die Together? An Intergalactic Murder Mystery". Philip has received a position of a KIPAC fellow at Stanford University.

XENON1T data could be either evidence of new particle physics or unexpected contaminant.

“Finding who you are, what you do best and what you enjoy doing will bring you in the right direction—in research, and more broadly, in life,” says Prof. Paolo Privitera. “For this reason, I do not rush the students to focus on a single big project when they start working with me.”

Congratulations to Prof. Paolo Privitera

Fermilab, UChicago scientists tap South Pole Telescope data to shed light on universe

A team of scientists have demonstrated how to "weigh" galaxy clusters using light from the earliest moments of the universe - a new method that could help shed light on dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the cosmos, such as how the universe formed.

A new solar telescope in Hawaii has captured images of the sun unlike any seen before.  Professor Robert Rosner, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago and one of the lead investigators on the project, says he’s been waiting for almost 40 years to see images like the ones recently captured.

"The most exciting thing is always something you haven't anticipated. In astronomy, whenever we've invented a new way to look at the sky, we discover something new that no one had ever thought of before. Our gravitational wave detectors haven't discovered anything profoundly unexpected, at least not yet."
- Daniel Holz, astrophysicist

Citation: "For central contribution to the first measurement of Coherent Elastic Neutrino-Nucleus Scattering."