Department News

Congratulations to Imke de Pater!

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has honored her by naming an Asteroid in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the study of minor bodies of the Solar System.Read more about Asteroid named after Imke de Pater!

Congratulations to Abigail Lee on being awarded 2025 IAU PhD Prize!

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is delighted to announce the recipients of the 2025 IAU PhD Prizes. These ...Read more about Abigail Lee has been awarded 2025 IAU PhD Prize

The rings around Uranus have mystified astronomers for almost half a century. Now, thanks to a combination of ground- and space-based telescopic observations, scientists think they’ve worked out where two of these rings came from.

A blue-tinged ring, named Mu, seems to be made of icy...Read more about Uranus has weird rings. Astronomers now know the source of two of them

Congratulations to Professor Alex Filippenko on being awarded 2026 Gruber Cosmology Prize!

Read full article here: https...Read more about Professor Alex Filippenko awarded Gruber Cosmology Prize for work on supernovae

In a Q&A, UC Berkeley astronomer Gibor Basri reality-checks the recent sci-fi movie and talks about the chances of encountering life elsewhere in the galaxy.

In the sci-fi book and now movie Project Hail Mary, astronaut...Read more about In ‘Project Hail Mary,’ Ryan Gosling encounters aliens. How likely is that?

A UC Berkeley theorist proposed that highly magnetized, spinning neutron stars were the power source behind superluminous supernovae. A recent supernova provided the smoking gun.

Astronomers have for the first time seen the birth of a magnetar — a highly magnetized, spinning...Read more about Astronomers capture birth of a magnetar, confirming link to some of universe’s brightest exploding stars

Congratulations to Professor Wenbin Lu on being awarded the 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship, a prestigious award which honors exceptional scholars that stand out as early-career researchers.

Read full article here:...Read more about Wenbin Lu Named 2026 Sloan Fellow

A team featuring our own Professor Dan Weisz was featured recently in an article from NASA highlighting how they used observations from The James Webb Space Telescope of a nearby galaxy to study interstellar dust that is thought to be similar to what was presented in the early...Read more about NASA Webb Finds Early-Universe Analog’s Unexpected Talent for Making Dust

Astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around single stars, but few around binary stars — even though both types of stars are equally common. Physicists can now explain the dearth.

Of the more than 4,500 stars known to have planets, one puzzling statistic stands out. Even...Read more about Why are Tatooine planets rare? Blame general relativity.

Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the...Read more about Wenbin Lu receives award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement in the second year of Scialog: Early Science with the LSST

We are proud to announce that Professor Martin White was honored by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) as a new Fellow for pioneering contributions to our understanding of current cosmology, the cosmic microwave background and baryon acoustic oscillations, clustering...Read more about Professor Martin White Named American Astronomical Society (AAS) Fellow

While searching for exoplanets, scientists captured the first direct images of colliding objects in a neighboring star system. “We just witnessed the collision of two planetesimals and the dust cloud that gets spewed out of that violent event, which begins reflecting...Read more about Astronomers see fireworks from violent collisions around nearby star

Astronomy faculty Chung-Pei Ma was featured in an article by the National Academy of Sciences celebrating black holes and Professor Ma’s contributions to the field, including highlighting a paper published earlier this year about a supermassive Black Hole 20 billion times the mass of the Sun!...Read more about Celebrating Black Hole Friday with Chung-Pei Ma

Kareem El-Badry, a former UC Berkeley graduate student and now an assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech, has been awarded a prestigious 2025 MacArthur Fellowship for his groundbreaking work in astrophysics. El-Badry's research focuses on the formation, evolution, and...Read more about UC Berkeley Astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry Named 2025 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellow

University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have now discovered the first instance of a massive black hole tearing apart a star thousands of light years from the galaxy’s core, which itself contains a massive black hole.

“The classic location where you expect...Read more about Not one, but two massive black holes are eating away at this galaxy

Imagine a Slushee^TM composed of ammonia and water encased in a hard shell of water ice. Now picture these ice-encrusted slushballs, dubbed “mushballs,” raining down like hailstones during a thunderstorm, illuminated by intense flashes of lightning.

Planetary scientists at the...Read more about On Jupiter, it’s mushballs all the way down

The Heising-Simons Foundation’s Science program announced a new class of 51 Pegasi b Fellows, comprised of eight outstanding early career scientists focused on...Read more about Nick Choksi has been awarded one of the 2025 51 Pegasi b Fellowships