News: Research

On trip to Chilean telescope, UChicago undergrad class sheds new light on evolution of earliest stars

Still in its original galaxy, a rare holdout from the second generation of stars sheds new light on the origins of the elements—and how massive supernovae reshaped the cosmos

The near-real-time alert system will enable scientists around the world to coordinate follow-up observations like never before

Unique UChicago-led instrument PUEO caught a ride aboard a NASA balloon in search of high-energy neutrinos

The Payload for Ultrahigh Energy Observations (PUEO) Launched on December 20th and completed a successful 23 day flight.  It is the most sensitive instrument ever built to detect the highest energy neutrinos!

UChicago astrophysicists test a new piece of the sky to probe dark matter and dark energy

Pioneering cosmologist honored for landmark measurements of the Hubble Constant

UChicago astrophysicists’ physics-based models suggest dark energy may be evolving

Professors Paolo Privitera (Astronomy & Astrophysics and KICP) and Andrew Cleland (PME) have received a 2025-2027 DARPA award to develop novel qubit-based detectors of low-energy neutrinos.  The UChicago-led consortium supported by the QuSeN (Quantum Sensing of Neutrinos) program includes Northwestern University, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of California San Diego and Fermilab.

UChicago scientists probe the nature of mysterious ‘hidden-sector’ dark matter in DAMIC-M experiment

KICP is collaborating with Adler Planetarium, the SkAI Institute, and the Kavli Center for Ethics in Berkeley on a new Kavli Foundation funded project exploring ethics questions surrounding the use of AI in citizen science efforts, and in basic science research and communication more broadly.

Analysis of cosmic microwave background reinforces Hubble constant measurement

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.

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".