Astronomy at Texas A&M University

Please visit our Astronomy Research page to learn more about our individual areas of research.

Over the past three years, Texas A&M University has built up an exciting astronomy program. At the moment, there are seven faculty astronomers: Nick Suntzeff, Darren DePoy, Kevin Krisciunas, Lucas Macri, Casey Papovich, Kim-Vy Tran and Lifan Wang.

The areas of research covered by the faculty include: supernovae and their application to cosmology, galaxy formation and evolution, resolved stellar populations, detection of extrasolar planets, and astronomical instrumentation. We are involved in many of the most ambitious astronomy programs of the next decade:the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Joint Dark Energy Mission, HETDEX, the Dark Energy Survey and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. TAMU is also playing a leading role in building up the Antarctic Plateau as a site for astronomical observations; Dr. Lifan Wang is the Director of the Chinese Center for Antarctic Astronomy, which currently consists of three Schmidt telescopes. Among many other goals, the Antarctic telescopes will be able to routinely discover planets of the size of the Earth.

While we await first light from these ambitious projects, we are currently using world class telescopes to perform our observational studies. Drs. Suntzeff and Krisciunas are members of the Carnegie Supernova Project and are using the telescopes of Carnegie Observatory. Dr. Wang has a long term collaboration with astronomers from the European Southern Observatory to use the Very Large Telescopes to acquire spectropolarimetry data of nearby supernovae. Dr. DePoy has built instruments which have been deployed to telescopes in all continents. Dr. Macri uses the Hubble Space Telescope as well as the Gemini and WIYN telescopes to study Cepheid variables and the resolved stellar populations of nearby galaxies. Dr. Papovich uses the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes and the Keck, Magellan, Gemini and Subaru telescopes to study galaxy formation and evolution. Dr. Tran combines observations from the Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra space telescopes and the VLT and Magellan observatories to study how galaxies form and evolve.

We also have a campus observatory which is used for educational and outreach purposes.