Research in astronomy & astrophysics

Our active and vibrant astronomy program, fully established in 2006, continues to grow in size and reputation. As of January 2022, we have seven faculty members and a growing number of postdocs and graduate stundents. With the establishment of the Nevada Center for Astrophysics (NCfA) in January 2022, our program enjoys further expansion with the hires of one more faculty member and two Prize Postdoc fellows.

The research interests of the astronomy group span all major active research areas in astrophysics, including stars and exoplanets, protoplanetary disks, accretion disks/outflows/jets from neutron stars and stellar-size/supermassive black holes, gamma-ray bursts, multi-messenger astrophysics, time-domain astrophysics, galaxy formation and evolution, cosmology, as well as atomic & molecular astrophysics. The research on the protoplanetary disks and exoplanets can be found at the star and planet formation group website.

The pages at right summarize in more detail the specific research interests of each of our faculty members.