Astronomy & Astrophysics

A night sky panorama of the Magellan telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile

Eyes on Our Own Skies

Las Campanas Observatory in Chile provides our scientists with access to first-in-class telescopes with views of the Magellanic clouds and the entire southern sky.

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A Century Plus of Experience

Our telescopes and instruments are designed on campus, so our astronomers and theorists can work closely with our engineers and machinists to create the optical designs of the future.

Poised for Breakthroughs

Astronomy represents humanity’s scientific quest to discover the origins and evolution of the universe and life itself. Carnegie astronomers revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos.

Today, new capabilities in telescopes, advanced imaging, and computation make ours the first generation of scientists who will have the tools to answer vital questions about the forces that shaped our cosmos, including:

How can the evolution of stars and galaxies advance our understanding of the physical rules governing the cosmos? What more can supernovae and massive stellar collisions teach us about the fundamental building blocks of life? What are the conditions for star formation and evolution that produce habitable planets?

Research

From discoveries in our own Solar System to revealing the physics underpinning our universe.

Dark matter in a simulated galaxy like our own Milky Way, courtesy of Andrew Wetzel.
A map of intergalactic hydrogen where yellow-to-red represents high density regions and blue-to-black indicates areas of low density. Credit: Andrew Newman.
The Milky Way is visible over the du Pont telescope at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile
This illustration shows a star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This illustration shows a star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Artist's conception of a large gas giant planet orbiting a small red dwarf star called TOI-5205. Image by Katherine Cain, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
Artist's conception of neutron stars colliding, by Robin Dienel, courtesy of Carnegie Institution for Science
A representation of a merger tree from the model Galacticus, used to determine the formation and evolution of the galaxies. Image courtesy Andrew Benson.

Earth & Planets Laboratory Scientists

Observatories Scientists

Gwen Rudie

Gwen Rudie

Staff Scientist, Director of the Carnegie Astrophysics Summer Student Internship (CASSI)

Related Divisions

Sunset reddens the sky behind the Magellan telescopes at Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

Our Telescopes

Carnegie Science's Las Campanas Observatory is known worldwide for the quality of its dark skies, which remain clear and stable due to its location above the Atacama Desert—the most arid non-polar place on the planet. Learn about our suite of telescopes, including the word-class twin Magellan Baade and Clay, as well as the just-completed Local Volume Mapper. 

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Giant Magellan Telescope rendering

Giant Magellan Telescope

The Giant Magellan is currently under construction at Carnegie Science's Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, one of the best places on Earth to build a telescope. It is poised to provide insights into some of humanity's biggest questions and ring in a renaissance of ground-based astronomy.

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JWST image

JWST

Carnegie Science astrophysicists and planetary scientists continue to showcase their creativity and propensity for bold research ideas using JWST. Over three cycles of telescope-time allocation, 13 projects headed up by Carnegie-affiliated astronomers have been selected to use JWST to study objects ranging from exoplanet atmospheres to the earliest generations of stars and galaxies.

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