News

Scientists have found a planet that challenges the long-held assumption that lava planets are too hot to sustain an atmosphere. Dr. Lisa Dang, a physics and astronomy professor at the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics, and her collaborators made this discovery when they found a thick atmosphere around the rocky exoplanet TOI-561 b after flagging it as a planet of interest. 

In two recently published papers, members of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Waterloo presented a new measurement of the Hubble parameter using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI).

Scientists, including Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics’ Professor Lisa Dang, have discovered a huge cloud of helium gas is escaping from the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-121 b, an “ultra-hot Jupiter.” Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists found that the helium stretches into long tails in front of and behindthe planet as it orbits around its star. The planet is losing atmosphere in dramatic ways, but current models can’t fully explain the observed structure, leaving scientists searching for more information. 

Dr Carlos Garcia Garcia is a cosmologist working at the interface of data and theory to understand the nature of dark energy.

As we settle into the new school year, we're taking a moment to look back at the highlights of the WCA's public outreach programming over 2024-25!

This week the WCA and the Department of Physics and Astronomy hosted the GEESE-ON workshop, bringing together astronomers from across Ontario studying the evolution of galaxies.

New EHT images reveal unexpected polarization flips at M87* that are giving scientists insight into the year-by-year evolution of a supermassive black hole’s ring 

Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics researchers Will Percival and Brian McNamara have received funding from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to support their work studying cosmology, galaxy clusters and supermassive black holes.  

Dr. Will Percival, distinguished research chair in Astrophysics and director of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics, has been recognized as a 2025 Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His research focuses on cosmology, large-scale structure and data analysis methods in astrophysics. 

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) has announced its selection of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration as the recipient of the 2026 Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust Prize.