Reconnect with UMass Astronomy at Alumni Weekend 2026!
October 23–24, 2026
We're excited to welcome our alumni back to campus for a weekend that celebrates the people, research, and community that make UMass Astronomy special.
Department Events
What's Happening
From left: Former PhD student Sam Cutler ’25 (seated); Richard Pan, Tufts graduate student; Professor Kate Whitaker; and John Weaver, an MIT Brinson Prize Fellow. Credit: The Daily Hampshire Gazette.
JWST UNCOVER Collaboration Including CNS Astronomers and Alumni to Receive Berkeley Prize
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) UNCOVER collaboration—which included past and present researchers from the Department of Astronomy in the College of Natural Sciences at UMass Amherst—has been selected to receive the 2027 Lancelot M. Berkeley-New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy, recognizing its groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the early universe.
Artist rendering of PRIMA Observatory. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
UMass Amherst Astronomer Alexandra Pope is Science Team Lead for New NASA Space Telescope
The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Professor of Astronomy Alexandra Pope is the ‘Science Team Lead’ for NASA’s recently announced new space telescope, PRIMA (Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics). PRIMA, whose concept development was led by Jason Glenn, professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia, will be probing currently unobserved parts of the universe’s infrared spectrum, and is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (managed for NASA by Caltech).
Some of the "little red dot" galaxies discovered by the JWST. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Dale Kocevski (Colby College))
Galaxies housing the James Webb Space Telescope's mysterious 'Little Red Dots' might've revealed their secrets
Since it began sending observations back to Earth in summer 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has helped scientists create a much clearer picture of the universe, but it has also delivered some frustrating mysteries. Among these is the puzzle of the "Little Red Dots (LRDs)," strange compact cosmic objects that appear in the early universe but disappear before the cosmos is around 2 billion years old.
"We hadn't seen anything like LRDs in the local universe," team member Jorge Zavala of the University of Massachusetts Amherst told Space.com.
UMass Amherst Astronomer Looks into the Cradle Where Stars are Born
Using data from both the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes, an international team of astronomers, including the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Distinguished Professor Daniela Calzetti, have been able to, for the first time, glimpse one of the most mysterious parts of a star’s life: the moments just after birth, when the star is still wrapped in its “natal cloud.” This glimpse does more than shine a bright light on stars’ lifecycle; it also answers one of the thorniest questions from the early universe: how did the early universe manage to re-ionize itself after it cooled down from the Big Bang?