Yale Astronomy Department

09/30/2026

https://yaledailynews.com/articles/yale-club-hopes-to-help-students-of-all-ages-spot-constellations

The Yale Astronomical and Space Student Society hopes to expand its astrophotography workshops and lessons to New Haven Public School students. The organization held its first introductory astrophotography workshop on Friday.

08/14/2026

Astronomers just captured a never-before-seen detail of how matter makes its way from stars into planets and eventually even living things—and they did it entirely by accident.

“It happens a few times in your career, that you take an image and realize no one’s ever seen this before,” says van Dokkum, an astrophysicist at Yale University. “It’s the best feeling.”

A new study of the Helix Nebula shows a never-before-seen detail of how dying stars recycle elements. Researchers found it by accident

07/16/2026

Yale Astronomy would like to congratulate, not one but TWO Yale graduate students, Josephine Baggen and Will Cerny, for the 2026 Price Prize in Cosmology and Astrophysics. This is a prestigious award given to a senior graduate student in recognition of "research excellence and exceptional promise". Congrats to both of you! ✨💫⭐️
https://ccapp.osu.edu/news/2026-price-prize-winners-announced

07/07/2026

Congratulations to Yale Astronomy Postdoc, Luisa Buzzo, winner of the Astronomical Society of Australia’s Charlene Heisler Prize for Outstanding PhD Thesis! ✨💫

Dr Maria Luisa Buzzo’s PhD thesis on the origins of ultra-diffuse galaxies resulted in 8 first-author publications in leading journals and 20 influential co-authored papers. Working across an unusually wide range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet (GALEX) to radio (ALMA), she combined photometry, spectroscopy, Bayesian spectral energy distribution fitting, and machine-learning approaches to show that UDGs do not share a single formation mechanism but instead arise from at least two distinct evolutionary pathways.

Luisa presented the first coherent observational picture of how a globular cluster-rich, dark matter-deficient UDG may form — linking an old galaxy, a chain of young massive clusters, and a high-velocity companion in a way that matches the expectations of high-speed encounter scenarios. She also showed that dark matter-deficient dwarf galaxies are not isolated anomalies but represent a genuine and repeatable class, with important implications for our understanding of galaxy–environment interactions.

06/22/2026

A Yale-led team of astronomers found a third galaxy devoid of dark matter — located alongside the other two in a formation that has never been seen before.

02/06/2026

Yale Astrophysics undergrads Yu-Ting Chang & Lucas Zimmermann (YASSS Co-Presidents) and the Yale Astronomical & Space Student Society are looking to raise $2,500 to purchase telescopes and astrophotography equipment, and help fund the dark-sky trip, allowing their members and the Yale/New Haven communities experience the wonders of the night sky up close. An investment in this equipment would last over a decade and enable them to extend their outreach to local schools, inspiring the next generation of astronomers. 💫✨🌔🔭

Please share and help if you can!
https://givetoday.yale.edu/schools/YaleUniversity/yalesoar/pages/yale-astronomical-space-student-society-s-telescopes-and-dark-sky-trip-fundraiser/?a=1

01/20/2026

Congratulations to Ray Jayawardhana ’94—one of Yale’s standout astronomy and physics majors of the early 1990s who has been named the 10th president of the California Institute of Technology, assuming the role on July 1, 2026.

A Yale College graduate with a B.S. in astronomy and physics, Jayawardhana has gone on to become a leading astrophysicist and academic statesman. He currently serves as the chief academic officer of Johns Hopkins University and is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy, widely respected for his work on stars and exoplanets as well as for bringing science to broader public audiences.

Those who knew him in the Yale Department of Astronomy are unsurprised. As Professor Emeritus Richard Larson recalls: "I knew Ray Jayawardhana (‘RayJay’) very well when he was an Astronomy major at Yale between 1990 and 1994. He was an exceedingly enterprising student from Sri Lanka and our best student at the time. He was unstoppable as a Yale student and has been unstoppable ever since.”

From his days as a driven Yale undergraduate to the presidency of one of the world’s premier scientific institutions, Jayawardhana’s trajectory reflects the kind of intellectual ambition and leadership that Yale takes pride in.

10/10/2025

Congratulations to Kareem El-Badry, '16 (Astrophysicist), and Nabarun Dasgupta (Epidemiologist) ’03 M.P.H., Kristina Douglass (Archaeologist) ’16 Ph.D. on receiving the MacArthur 'genius' Fellowship! 💫✨

Nabarun Dasgupta ’03 M.P.H., Kristina Douglass ’16 Ph.D., and Kareem El-Badry ’16 are among 22 recipients of 2025 MacArthur Fellowships.

08/12/2025

🚀💻💫The AstroCodEx team is excited to host a 2-day workshop here at Yale to further develop the AstroCodEx (https://astrocodex.github.io/intro.html) and discuss creative teaching strategies and pedagogy. The workshop will be for educators (including teaching fellows) to build on your own exercises or develop new exercises and receive constructive peer feedback on them. The meeting will take place on Thursday August 21 to Friday August 22 from 9am to 5pm in KT 101. Information and the schedule is available here: https://astrocodex.github.io/hackday.html.

As a part of the discussion on teaching and pedagogy, there will be sessions for short presentations. These presentations will be informal and about 5-10 minutes. Presentations can be submitted in the registration form. All contributions are welcome!

Please register at this link https://forms.gle/D198Dt47aFNyNcRR6 by Thursday August 14 so that we may get an accurate headcount for coffee and lunch.

Thank you for your interest!

The AstroCodEx Team ✨ (Imad Pasha, Kendra Nguyen, Malena Rice, and Yasmeen Asali)

07/16/2025

Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and a team of researchers have discovered an object in space they call the “Infinity” galaxy — two recently-collided galaxies that, together, look like the symbol for infinity.

A Yale-led astronomy team may have discovered the first direct evidence of a supermassive black hole just after it formed — in a galaxy they’re calling “Infinity.”