...where the Universe is our laboratory.
The Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics (WCA) looks to the cosmos to solve the greatest mysteries of the universe. Here, world-class researchers and students come together in an atmosphere of curiosity, creativity and collaboration; exploring our cosmic origin to truly understand the physical processes at work in the Universe. From black holes to cosmology, we aim to understand what lies beyond the Earth. The possibilities for new discovery are limitless.
News
Incoming WCA Professor Awarded 100 Hours of JWST Cycle 4 Time to Investigate Lava Worlds
Lisa Dang, an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo, has been awarded 100 hours of JWST observing time in Cycle 4 for her program, "Surveying Hellish Worlds: Lava Planets as Time Capsules of Thermal Evolution."
Evidence mounting that dark energy evolves over time
New results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration use the largest 3D map of our universe ever made to track dark energy’s influence over the past 11 billion years. Researchers see hints that dark energy, widely thought to be a “cosmological constant,” might be evolving over time in unexpected ways.
On the same day, DESI has released the largest 3D map of the Universe to date to the public.
Euclid dazzles with new data and images
The first batch of survey data released by the Euclid mission gives us a glimpse into hundreds of thousands of galaxies reaching back 10.5 billion light years - and it's only the beginning.
Events
Astroseminar - Zachary Slepian
"2, 3, 4 point functions: GPU, some math, some data"
Zack Slepian is currently a tenured associate professor in the astronomy department at the University of Florida, and previous to that held Einstein and Chamberlain fellowships at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory after a PhD at Harvard with Daniel Eisenstein. His major focus has been measuring and using higher-order clustering statistics of galaxies in redshift surveys such as BOSS, DESI and Roman, including the first detection of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the galaxy 3-point function, and intriguing evidence for parity violation in the galaxy 4-point function
WCA-KPL Public Talk - Galaxies, Clusters, and the Biggest Things in the Universe (Roan Haggar)
Astrophysics deals with structures of incredible sizes and scales. But what are the biggest things out there, and how big can something actually get? In this month’s KPL astronomy talk, Roan Haggar will speak about galaxy clusters, the largest objects in our Universe that are held together by gravity, discussing what clusters are made from and what we can learn by studying them.
Astroseminar - Hugo Holland
"The separate universe approach in multifield inflation models"
Hugo Holland is a second year PhD student in Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay (just south of Paris). He works with Julien Grain on stochastic inflation and all things related. Before his PhD, Hugo graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in France and got his masters degree in theoretical physics at King's College London, where he worked on eternal inflation with Eleni Alexandra Kontou.