9 seniors receiving their Bachelor’s Degree this year from the Department of Astronomy. Congratulations!

• Bryan Brzycki, Astrophysics/Physics
• Sean Dillett, Astrophysics/Physics
• Richard Feder-Staehle, Astrophysics/Physics
• Danielle Frostig, Astrophysics/Physics
• Eden Girma,...

Congratulations to the class of 2018. Photos will be added to this post after the ceremony today. 

Kate Alexander, Edo Berger, Cosmic Extremes: Probing Energetic Transients with...

Edo Berger also presented the Leo Goldman prize for excellence in a senior thesis to Eden Girma. Eden is also a recipient of a University Hoopes Prize for the project entitled “Astrometric Detection of Intermediate Mass Black Holes.”

At the annual Awards Ceremony, Rita Fireman and Astronomy Chair Avi Loeb are seen presenting the Fireman Fellowship Award to Philip Cowperthwaite for this year's best dissertation in the field of Astrophysics at Harvard.  This award is named in honor of Rita's husband, Edward Fireman, a long time physicist at the Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory.  Phil is a student of Edo Berger and will be starting a Hubble Post-doctoral Fellowship at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena. 

"In the debut episode of 'Our Friend from Israel,' we chat with Dr. Avi Loeb about why he's searching for aliens and a new Earth for humans."

Listen: https://www.fromthegrapevine.com/podcasts/innovation/avi-loeb-harvard-astronomer-and-alien-hunter

"What is the distribution of sizes of black holes in our universe? Can black holes of any mass exist, or are there gaps in their possible sizes? The shape of this black-hole mass function has been debated for decades — and the dawn of gravitational-wave astronomy has only spurred further questions."

Read More: https://aasnova.org/2018/05/09/sizes-of-black-holes-throughout-the-universe/

Garcia-Mejia: Last month, I was lucky enough to win a NASA lottery to attend the TESS launch as a VIP guest at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL. As is the case with rocket launches, there were a series of launch windows starting on April 16, 2018, at 6:32pm. As hundreds of scientists were getting ready to board the buses that would take us from the KSC visitor complex to the viewing site on April 16, a NASA representative crushed our launch-viewing dreams with a simple two words: "launch scrubbed". A second launch window did not open until Wednesday, April 18 at 6:...