Who We Are

A Message from the Department Head

Dear Friends of the Department,

I had the chance to catch up with many of our department and college alumni in April at the Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey, as well as on a Zoom follow-up webinar last month, where astronomer Joel Leja explored the "little red dots" in our early universe. It was so nice to connect with many of you, and I hope to meet with many others soon. This week, we are running AstroFest, our popular four-night celebration of astronomy activities and stargazing during the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. If you happen to be in State College for ArtsFest this week, please stop by Davey Lab in the evening for AstroFest!

In the meantime, I want to take a moment to share a few Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics updates and highlights. While I’ve been lucky to lead this department for four years now, I have to say that I am still amazed by the everyday, far-reaching impact of my fellow faculty members, students, staff, and postdoctoral scholars. 

Our department has a rich history of teaching and research. We have one of the largest academic astronomy programs in the country and serve as worldwide leaders in areas like surveys, exoplanets, and instrumentation. We're also proud of our mission-driven outreach. Among our strengths are the inclusion of student trainees early in our research and the interdisciplinary nature of our research, often led by our department, as well as including scientists from across all of Penn State in fields such as engineering, materials research, and earth and mineral sciences.

The Consortium for Planetary and Exoplanetary Science and Technology, or "Penn State Planetary," as we call it, was established in 2020 and consists of six interdisciplinary centers: the Astrobiology Research Center (ARC), Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds (CEHW), Center for Space Research Programs (CSRP), Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium (PSGC), Planetary System Science Center (PSSC), and Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence (PSETI) Center. 

Our department is a community of curiosity-driven researchers and educators and is truly a hub for innovation that is drawing collaborators from all over the world. We just held one of several global watch parties for the launch of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, to celebrate our researchers who have been integral to the international project (see some images below). And, looking ahead, our PSETI Center is finalizing plans for the 2025 PSETI Symposium next month, after organizing the first-ever international gathering of SETI researchers in 2022.

And this fall we're thrilled to be welcoming two new faculty members—Charlotte Ward, an expert in large-scale, time-domain survey science, is coming to us from a postdoctoral position at Princeton University; and Renyu Hu, who specializes in researching planetary and exoplanetary atmospheres, is coming to us from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory—who will add to our research and teaching excellence.

To that end, I’m pleased to share with you a 2024–25 overview of our department.

Best wishes,

Randall McEntaffer
Head, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Physics, and Materials Science and Engineering

A Celebration 20 Years in the Making

This image unveiled at the first-look event combines 678 separate images taken by NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in just over seven hours of observing time. Combining many images in this way clearly reveals otherwise faint or invisible details, such as the clouds of gas and dust that comprise the Trifid Nebula (top) and the Lagoon Nebula, which are several thousand light-years away from Earth. Credit: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

More than 50 department faculty, staff, students, postdocs, and friends gathered in June to celebrate the unveiling of the first ultrahigh-definition images and videos from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)–Department of Energy (DOE) Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Over the next decade, the observatory will conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), to create an ultrawide, ultrahigh-definition time-lapse record of the universe. Penn State has been an LSST member institution since 2005, and our faculty have held roles on the LSST board, science advisory committee, and science collaborations. Credit: Michelle Bixby

What Happened in the Past Year?

Research Highlights

Penn State astronomy and astrophysics continues to excel in specialty areas such as surveys, exoplanets, instrumentation, theory, and gravitational waves. In addition to our distinguished faculty, one-third of all Penn State University Park postdocs work in the Eberly College of Science, with 12 in the astronomy and astrophysics department alone.

Here are some recent research highlights:

• "Unveiling the secrets of planet formation in environments of high UV radiation"
• "Combination of cosmic processes shapes the size and location of sub-Neptunes"
• "Does planetary evolution favor human-like life? Study ups odds we're not alone"
• "Could an Earth-like alien civilization detect us?"
• "New planet in Kepler-51 system discovered using James Webb Space Telescope"
• "NASA telescopes discover brown dwarf protoplanetary disks in the Orion Nebula"
• "Rare, ultra-luminous nova spotted in the Small Magellanic Cloud"
• "Exoplanet caught in ‘hairpin turn’ signals how high mass gas giants form"
• "Tiny bright objects discovered at dawn of universe baffle scientists"
• "Are nearby planets sending radio signals to each other?"
• "What happens when neutron stars collide?"
• "Astronomers find unexpected accelerating quasar winds around distant black hole"
• "How do supermassive black holes get super massive?"
• "Brightest gamma-ray burst of all time aids search for origin of heavy elements"
• "NASA’s Chandra identifies a black hole whose bark is worse than its bite"

Additionally, in March, the US Postal Service announced that an image taken in 2022 by astronomer Kevin Luhman—of a nebula in the Perseus constellation—with the James Webb Space Telescope was selected to be printed on a stamp for priority express mail. Read more about Luhman's research, in which he is using these images to detect brown dwarfs.

Faculty and Student Honors

Our faculty have received many awards, grants, fellowships, and honors, including the following:

• Charles E. Kaufman Foundation Award (David Radice and Eric Ford)
• Fellow of the American Physical Society (Doug Cowen)
• Penn State Atherton Professor (Alexander Wolszczan)
• Penn State 2025 Excellence in Advising Award (Robert Morehead)

A few notable research awards this year included the following: 

• NASA Sustainment Award (David Radice, $920,000)
• NASA grants to support ultraviolet and X-ray astronomy (Randall McEntaffer, $4 million)

Our students have also been recognized for their achievements:

• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (Kanishk Pandey)

Academics

The department offers two undergraduate majors and a doctoral graduate program in Astronomy and Astrophysics. We also teach students from many other departments and colleges across the University Park campus. For example, in the 2024–25 school year, we taught more than 7,500 students in introductory astronomy courses alone.

Our astronomy students are actively involved in research, with hands-on experience and training in the skills that put them at the forefront of astronomy. This combination of quality coursework and superb research opportunities is preparing our students to assume positions in leading academic departments, national facilities, and laboratories, as well as careers in technology and other industries.

The discovery of a planet too big for its sun last year included work from students like graduate student researcher Megan Delamer, who analyzed data and was coauthor of the paper, and then-undergraduate student Abigail Minnich, who helped to craft models and visuals that would explain the discovery to the public. 

This past fall, our graduate students led by Pinchan Fan organized the 2024 Assembly of the Order of the Octopus, a three-day conference for more than 50 early-career researchers who work in, or would like to begin working in, the field of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), also known as the search for technosignatures.

And you may have read in the recent edition of the college's Science Journal magazine about the Penn State Pulsar Search Collaboratory, a student-led Penn State branch of the the nationwide Pulsar Search Collaboratory citizen-science project, which uses both undergraduates and high school students in the search for signals of pulsars, a type of astronomical object that emits radio waves.

Additionally, the department is a leader in the field of astrostatistics, and each year we host the Summer School in Statistics for Astronomers, an intensive program in statistical inference designed for graduate students and postdocs in astronomy and astrophysics across the country. Faculty and graduate students from the Eberly College of Science’s astronomy and astrophysics and statistics departments serve as summer school instructors.  

Alumni Achievement and Donor Support

Our alumni and friends continue to impress us with both their societal impact and their support of our department.

This semester, alumna Maura McLaughlin was one of six Eberly College of Science alumni to have received the 2025 Outstanding Science Alumni Award, and we were thrilled to welcome her back to campus for a talk on detecting monster black holes.

To culminate the semester, we were honored to have alumna Jane Rigby give an inspiring address to our spring 2025 graduates. In 2024, Rigby was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States. She also received the 2023 Alumni Fellow Award, the most prestigious award given by the Penn State Alumni Association. Read more about her time at Penn State, her path to NASA, and her work with the James Webb Space Telescope.

And, as always, external support of and partnership with our department helps to further our reach. Our department was honored to receive a $2 million gift to create the Dr. Keiko Miwa Ross Endowed Faculty Position in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. The funding is currently supporting the work of Joel Leja, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics, whose research explores the formation of distant galaxies.

Strategic Outreach and Partnerships

Alumni and friends of the department gathered April 5 at the Liberty Science Center's Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium—the largest in the Western Hemisphere—in Jersey City, New Jersey, for a spectacular display of the planetarium's capabilities. Credit: Michelle Bixby

Our faculty, staff, students, and postdocs are continuing to steward Penn State’s land-grant mission in many ways.

As mentioned above, we took a science-communications-and-immersive-theater talk on the road to an audience of more than 150 alumni, community members, faculty, staff, and student at the Liberty Science Center's Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium, in Jersey City, New Jersey, in April. The department has a long history of capitalizing on the public’s interest in astronomy to bring more advancements to a broader viewer base, and this talk was the next step in exploring an immersive theatre venue where all of Penn State can share their knowledge with the world.

We then ended the semester with an exciting model-rocket launch. Randy McEntaffer’s lab engages students from schools in State College and Virginia in the Rockets for Inclusive Science Education (RISE) program. Students build their rockets throughout the school year, and during the launch on campus they collect data using onboard single-board computers that they programmed to control accelerometers as well as temperature and pressure sensors. 

AstroFest, a four-night outreach program, welcomes more than 1,500 community members and visitors to Davey Lab for activities, planetarium shows, and stargazing each summer. Credit: Allison Wulfhorst, Michelle Bixby

As mentioned, more than 50 faculty, staff, students, and postdocs are volunteering this week for the department’s popular AstroFest program, which is marking its 26th anniversary. Over time, we've impacted more than 45,000 community members and visitors, and with the support our first-ever short-term fundraiser, we're aiming to run it for 25 more! (Organizer Chris Palma shared how to make a comet at home as part of our AstroFest promotion.)

This summer, Palma also launched a two-month astronomy exhibition, titled “From Your Backyard to the Cosmos: The Beauty and Science of Astrophotography," at our local Bellefonte Art Museum. We're pleased to once again be partnering with the Eberly College of Science's Science-U summer camps team to offer a "Life in Space" weeklong camp for middle school students, taught this year by astronomy graduate students Chloe Klare and Mary Ogborn.

Lastly, we're proud to hold the record for the largest audience to attend any event in Medlar Field at Lubarno Park—the home of Penn State baseball and the State College Spikes, the local collegiate summer baseball team of the Major League Baseball Draft League—for our safe and educational solar-eclipse viewing party, called SolarFest, last year. The event welcomed more than 8,400 community members and was accompanied by an educational website and social media campaign with our faculty and student experts.

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