In Memory of R. Kent Honeycutt

We are saddened by the loss of our friend and colleague John Hill Professor Emeritus R. Kent Honeycutt, who passed away on January 2, 2025. The family suggests that memorial gifts in lieu of flowers can be made to the IU Astronomy Department R. Kent Honeycutt Graduate Student Support fund or to First Presbyterian Church of Bloomington.

Department highlights

Astronomical Computing at IU

Computation plays a big part of astronomy research at IU, all the way from massive N-body calculations and analysis of very large datasets to our day-to-day desktop manipulations. Fortunately, IU provides the computational resources to make all this possible.

Tracking the Missing Lithium in Stars

IU astronomer Constantine Deliyannis uses the abundances of Li, Be, and B to test the various mechanisms listed above, using both stars in the field and stars belonging to star clusters. The latter are especially useful because their ages are known.

Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/D. Munizaga

The Blanco DECam Bulge Survey

Indiana University astronomers have begun to explore the bulge of stars in the heart of our Milky Way using a new survey of 250 million stars imaged with the Dark Energy Camera on the Blanco Telescope in Chile.

The 347-person team that made the first image of a supermassive black hole has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, one of the “Oscars of Science.” By synchronizing 8 radio telescopes, the team created a virtual telescope the size of the Earth, with a resolving power never before achieved from the Earth’s surface. One of their first targets was the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. NOAO Astronomer Tod Lauer is a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team.

Credit:
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration

Protecting Radio Skies

Astronomers make use of wide regions of the electromagnetic spectrum for observations, including ultraviolet, optical, infrared, and radio light.

The WIYN One Degree Imager (ODI) is a state-of-the-art wide-field imaging instrument, operated at a superb level of performance and efficiency, offering outstanding opportunities to enable frontier astrophysical research for the WIYN Users Community.
Credit:G. Muller and NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/

Star Formation Across Cosmic Time

IU Astronomers actively explore how galaxies have evolved through the history of the Universe, focusing both on star formation and chemical abundances. Observations span the range from radio wavelengths to infrared (IR), optical, and ultraviolet (UV) portions of the spectrum, making use of both new observations and archival data.

The NEID instrument, mounted on the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. The NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research (NN-EXPLORE) partnership funds NEID (short for NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler spectroscopy).
Credits: NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/KPNO/NSF/AURA

NEID at WIYN

Roughly 5000 “exoplanets” (planets orbiting other stars outside the Solar System) have been discovered, and that number is growing rapidly each year. These exoplanets possess a startling array of properties, leading to new and unexpected discoveries in this emerging field.