News

Will Percival has been awarded funding through the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) 2025 Exploration Competition for research into Dark Energy.  Over the next two years, Percival and his interdisciplinary team will adapt methodological expertise from the fields of biostatistics and computational statistics and apply these tools to cosmological data. 

Exploration grants through the NFRF are intended to support high-risk, high-reward research. They support projects that push boundaries into new and exciting areas by bringing disciplines together and exploring new concepts that, while bold, have potential for significant impact.

On April 30, residents of Luther Village on the Park stepped into the cosmos without leaving home. The retirement home hosted the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics (WCA) to an afternoon that paired cutting-edge astrophysics with an immersive journey through space inside Waterloo’s portable planetarium, the Astro-Bubble.

Professor Emeritus Michel (Mike) Fich of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Associate Member of the Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics has been awarded the 2026 Dunlap Award for Innovation in Astronomical Research Tools by the Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA).

For the last five years, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has been systematically scanning the night sky. Today marks the completion of its first map, which is the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe ever made.

Thirty-four years after scientists first conceived it, the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope (FYST) now rises above the Atacama Desert, near the summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Parque Astronómico Atacama.

FYST will help answer some of the most important questions in astronomy, including how the universe works, the nature of dark energy and dark matter, how galaxies form and evolve and what happened in those mysterious first moments after the Big Bang.

WCA scientists have developed a new way to understand how the universe began, and it could change what we know about the Big Bang and the earliest moments of cosmic history. Their work suggests that the universe’s rapid early expansion could have arisen naturally from a deeper, more complete theory of quantum gravity.

WCA researchers Ian Roberts and Michael Balogh lead the team that have discovered the highest redshift jellyfish galaxy, named for the long, tentacle-like streams that trail behind them.

Congratulations to graduate students Sofia Chiarenza and Cameron Morgan, who were awarded the 2025 WCA Student Paper prize.  They were presented with their certificates by Dr Sara Seager, who sits on the WCA Governing Board.

The WCA student paper prize is awarded to the papers judged to be the best graduate student-led papers submitted in the past year (July 1 2024 - June 20 2025).  They are evaluated on their importance to their field, originality of conception, difficulty of execution, clarity of the manuscript, and reproducibility.

Here, Cameron and Sofia describe their prize winning work.

In October, three WCA members took the "Astro-Bubble" planetarium on tour, sharing space and astronomy with students and communities across Northern Ontario.

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.