University of Florida News

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Any driver who’s seen deer silhouetted by the headlights of an oncoming car knows that vital information can be conveyed by the outlines of objects.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A team of three University of Florida astronomers contributed to the Kepler spacecraft’s discovery of two Saturn-sized planets, plus a possible third planet with a radius just one-and-a-half times that of Earth, orbiting a distant star.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Using the world’s largest optical telescope, a team of University of Florida astronomers has pioneered a new method of observing planets outside our solar system. The method suggests that large Earth-based telescopes could play a leading role in rapidly accelerating research on “extrasolar” planets.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — This summer, University of Florida astronomers inaugurated the world’s largest optical telescope on a nearly 8,000-foot mountaintop 3,480 miles away.
But it was a far more modest observatory, located just above sea level in rural Levy County and just down the road from the UF campus, that proved key to a new discovery [...]

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Less than two months after they inaugurated the world’s largest telescope, University of Florida astronomers have used one of the world’s most advanced telescopic instruments to gather images of the heavens.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — An investigation by a major scientific group headed by a University of Florida professor has advanced understanding of the early evolution of the universe.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Four hundred years after Galileo first turned his handmade telescope toward the heavens, the world’s largest, most technologically advanced telescope is set to make its formal debut.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A team of University of Florida astronomers is among the first in the world to make scientific-quality observations of the heavens using the newly completed Gran Telescopio Canarias, the world’s largest optical telescope.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A bit of serendipity has given astronomers a surprise view of a never-before-observed event in the birth of a galaxy.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A University of Florida-led sky survey that may double the number of known planets outside the solar system is part of a major new survey program announced today at the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas.