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UMass Amherst Astronomy to Mark the Spring Equinox on March 20
The public is invited to celebrate the spring equinox, which marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring, at the standing stones of the UMass Amherst Sunwheel on Friday, March 20 at 6:45 a.m. and 6:15 p.m. These hour-long Sunwheel events, at sunrise and sunset, mark the astronomical change of seasons when days and nights are nearly equal in length all around the world.
An International Team of Astronomers Led by UMass Amherst May Have Just Found One of the Missing Links in Galaxy Evolution
A team of 48 astronomers from 14 countries, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has discovered a population of dusty, star-forming galaxies at the far edges of the universe that formed only a billion years after the Big Bang, believed to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago.
Astronomers Find one of the Oldest Barred-Spiral Galaxies in the Universe
Research led by Daniel Ivanov, who earned his undergraduate degree at UMass Amherst studying under Professor of Astronomy Mauro Giavalisco and is now a physics and astronomy graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh, has uncovered a contender for one of the earliest observed spiral galaxies containing a stellar bar – a sometimes-striking visual feature that can play an important role in the evolution of a galaxy.
Giavalisco, as well as Yingjie Cheng, who received her doctorate in astronomy from UMass Amherst, and John Weaver, who completed a postdoc in UMass Amherst’s astronomy department, are all co-authors of the new research, which helps constrain the timeframe in which bars could have first emerged in the universe. Analysis of light from the galaxy, called COSMOS-74706, places it on the cosmic timeline at about 11.5 billion years ago.