Congratulations 2024 UMass Astronomy Graduates!
Congratulations on your well-deserved success! Your leadership and vision inspire us all. Here's to many more accomplishments in the future!
2024 Mary Dailey Irvine Outstanding Thesis Prize
The Department of Astronomy is pleased to announce that the 2024 Mary Dailey Irvine Outstanding Thesis Prize goes to: Zach Webb (UMass)
Thesis title: “New Insight into the Radial Distribution of Globular Clusters in Abell 2744 Using JWST”
Advisor: Professor Kate Whitaker
2024 UMass ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentor Award
Congratulations to Professor Alexandra Pope, who has been awarded the 2024 UMass ADVANCE Faculty Peer Mentor Award. This award recognizes the invaluable contributions of faculty members in mentoring and supporting their colleagues' professional development.
Kate Whitaker and Team Investigate Oldest Galaxies
Whitaker’s team devised an innovative pairing of telescopes to better understand why some of the oldest, most massive galaxies go quiescent early in their formation. The team used the Hubble Space Telescope, which sees ultraviolet to near-infrared light, including the light we can see with our own eyes, to detect these distant galaxies, which are so far away that we’re only just now seeing the light they emitted 10 billion to 12 billion years ago, when the universe was in its infancy. In effect, Whitaker’s team is looking into the deep past.
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