College of Arts and Sciences

  CWRU Astronomy's Jason J Nassau prize is awarded to outstanding senior astronomy majors for excellence in academics and research. This year's award was shared by two students, Grace Olivier and Liz Tarantino. Grace Olivier has been working with Professor Heather Morrison on testing inside-out galaxy formation models locally in the Milky Way.  Using the SEGUE stripes, she has created maps of the colors of stars in the outer disk of the Milky Way. From these maps she has found the ages of stars by matching the colors to stellar evolution models, after adjusting for the chemical composition of stars in different...

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A team of CWRU astronomers has recently identified 43 new protoclusters of galaxies, seen as they were 12 billion years in the past, when the Universe was only a few billion years old. These systems bridge the gap between the smooth early universe and the complexity of structure we see today. Barely 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe was hot, dense and very nearly uniform. It had only minute density fluctuations of one part in a hundred thousand. In contrast, at the present time we see galaxies grouped together along filaments and in dense clusters containing thousands...

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We are always grateful for the strong support we receive from our alumni and friends. CWRU alumnus Walter Bonsack ('54) got his start in astronomy as an undergraduate, using the Burrell Schmidt (located at the time in East Cleveland) to study the chemical composition of early type stars. From there he went on to an enormously successful career studying the physics of stars, working at major astronomical observatories including those at Mt Palomar, Mt Wilson, Lowell Observatory, and Mauna Kea. Professor Bonsack and his wife Sally recently made a generous pledge to support ongoing research opportunities for CWRU physics...

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Happy Halloween 2015 from CWRU Astronomy! Each year we carve astro-themed pumpkins to celebrate Halloween. This year we had starry-eyed pumpkin, M101 pumpkin, Star Wars Rebel Alliance pumpkin, and more! Check out more pictures from our annual carving event on our Facebook image gallery.

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