Astronomy

NASA has awarded $4.4 million to a collaboration of scientists at U.S. universities, including a Vanderbilt professor, and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to help build a 2.5-meter ultraviolet telescope called the Extreme Universe Space Observatory for deployment on the International Space Station in 2017. Read More

Two astronomers from Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, sharing a car after a snowstorm canceled their flights home from a conference, put together everything they had learned at the conference during that snowy drive and worked out that a collision between two black holes could explain most of what is known of a violent episode in the Milky Way's past. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy and physics, wraps up this three-part podcast series with an interview about her specialty, supermassive black holes. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy, continues her discussion of black holes in the second part of this interview for Red Orbit. Read More

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy, talks about what sets black holes apart from other objects in the universe and explains how the laws of space, time and gravity bend and even break down to create the most destructive force in the cosmos. Read More

Not long after he arrived at Vanderbilt nine years ago, Keivan Stassun, professor of astronomy, began building on a newly forged alliance with Fisk University, a historically black college just two miles from the Vanderbilt campus, in an effort to increase the number of African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and other minorities earning Ph.D. degrees in science. Read More

Caltech's John Johnson will discuss the success of NASA’s Kepler mission, which has identified hundreds of potentially habitable Earth-sized and smaller planets in the Milky Way, and Project Minerva, an innovative observation facility that uses an array of small telescopes rather than a single large telescope. Read More

This Week on VUCast, Vanderbilt’s online newscast: Star Power? Why ignorance is bliss when it comes to a star’s selling power. Football Fan Frenzy! We’re anchoring down with the Dores! VUCast takes you to the field Space Odyssey– How you can go on a… Read More

An electrical engineer who is attempting to make wireless communications more reliable, an astronomer who studies the evolution of the cosmos by creating large numbers of virtual universes and a geologist who is studying the origins of super-eruptions have received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development awards. Read More

Star gazers – both those who have a telescope and those who don’t – should be happy to learn that the largest-ever three-dimensional map of the universe has been released to the public. Read More

The latest observations of a newly born star have found that it has a pair of spots on its surface that are heated to more than one million degrees. The presence of these spots confirms a theory for how stellar infants grow advanced by Professor of Astronomy David Weintraub and a colleague. Read More

A small telescope with a lens no more powerful than a high-end digital camera has discovered the existence of two very unusual exoplanets. Read More

The Dyer Observatory is calling all science sleuths to help identify an unknown object spotted on June 5. Read More

Vanderbilt is on track this year to become the number one producer of minority Ph.D. recipients in physics, astronomy and materials science, an area where minorities are grossly underrepresented. Watch the emotional journey of the latest doctoral graduates from the Fisk-Vanderbilt-Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program. [vucastblurb]… Read More

The transit of Venus across the sun this Tuesday is a rare astronomical event, and will not happen again for more than 100 years. Read More

Astronomers have identified nearly 700 rogue stars that appear to have been ejected from the Milky Way galaxy. Read More

Vanderbilt Dyer Observatory Director Rocky Alvey celebrated two things he cares about deeply at the United Nations on April 12: music and astronomy. Rocky Alvey (John Russell/Vanderbilt) Singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman and Alvey’s collaborative album project The Mighty Sky was featured at the U.N.’s celebration of… Read More

The smallest exoplanets yet discovered orbit a dwarf star almost identical to Barnard’s star, one of the Sun’s nearest neighbors. The similarity helped the astronomers calculate the size of the distant planets. Read More

Watch video from the November 2 Thinking Out of the Lunchbox event. Vicki Greene, professor of Physics and Astronomy, spoke on “Newton’s Unfinished Business.” What is the universe really made of? From Newton onward, the concept of mass, or inertia, has been central to our understanding of the nature of… Read More

Professor of Astronomy David Weintraub wanted his students to remember more of what they learned in his introductory class than the answers to typical questions on a quiz show. That was a strong impetus for his book How Old Is The Universe? It strives to make astronomy understandable… Read More