College of Arts and Sciences

This fall marks the full public release of CWRU Astronomy's Burrell Schmidt Deep Virgo Survey. Over the course of seven observing seasons from 2004 through 2011, CWRU astronomer Chris Mihos and collaborators used the Burrell Schmidt telescope to conduct deep wide-field imaging of the nearby Virgo Cluster of galaxies. The survey covers over 15 square degrees of the cluster in two filters, providing surface photometry and color information for galaxies, tidal streams, and diffuse light in Virgo down to extremely low surface brightnesses (μB ~ 29.5 mag/arcsec2, or about 1/100 of the brightness of the dark night sky). The...

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Every year CWRU Astronomy holds a Halloween pumpkin carving event for faculty, staff, and students. This year added an extra treat -- a campus-wide power outage in the middle of the carving! There's nothing like a pack of CWRU Astro students running circles around their professors in the dark while holding sharp knives.... Check out pictures of the event on our CWRU Astronomy facebook page!

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A new radial acceleration relation found among spiral and irregular galaxies challenges current understanding – and possibly existence - of dark matter.   In the late 1970s, astronomers Vera Rubin and Albert Bosma independently found that spiral galaxies rotate at a nearly constant speed: the velocity of stars and gas inside a galaxy does not decrease with radius, as one would expect from Newton's laws and the distribution of visible matter, but remains approximately constant. Such 'flat rotation curves' are generally attributed to invisible, dark matter surrounding galaxies and providing additional gravitational attraction. Now a team led by Case Western Reserve University...

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With the new fall semester kicking off, we've just published the latest CWRU Astronomy newsletter. It features a Hubble Space Telescope study of the nearby spiral galaxy M101 by Chris Mihos and collaborators, a variety of new research databases created by CWRU astronomers, a feature of our historic 9.5" Warner and Swasey refractor, and more. Watch for it coming soon to your mailbox, or download a copy here.

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