Introduction

The astronomy and astrophysics program within the Department has close ties to the efforts in gravity physics and nuclear physics, as well as between theory and observations in general. Current research interests of faculty can be found here.

Department faculty and students use primarily the 4.1-meter SOAR Telescope atop Cerro Pachon in northern Chile. We receive 61 nights of observing time per year, accessed remotely from a control room in Chapman Hall. On the adjacent mountain, Cerro Tololo, UNC has a large fraction of the observing time on the PROMPT array of six 0.4 m U- to IR-band telescopes that are accessed remotely in a queue through the SkyNet Robotic Telescope Network interface that was developed at UNC. UNC receives 11 nights of observing time per year in queued mode on the 11-meter Southern African Large Telescope.

We also use national facilities, including the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the Gemini Observatory, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, as well as selected other facilities including the Australia Telescope, the Anglo-Australia Telescope, and the Keck Observatory.

Theoretical astrophysics employs data from all these facilities, aided by computational facilities in Phillips and Chapman Halls (Linux workstations) and the 1024-processor Topsail Dell research computing cluster (at 28 teraflops in 2007, it is one of the top 20 supercomputers worldwide).

Teaching and research facilities include PROMPT and a 24-inch aperture professional telescope with CCD spectrograph at the Morehead Observatory on campus.

Astronomical instrumentation also plays a major role in the Department, represented currently by the high-throughput, UV-efficient Goodman Spectrograph for the SOAR Telescope, development of large format volume phase holographic gratings for high-efficiency spectroscopy on telescopes up to ELT's, robotic telescope design and construction, and work on a multi-unit, integral-field feed for the Goodman Spectrograph.

Monthly research seminars and weekly "journal club" meetings of the faculty and students range over all interests, including the searches for exoplanets, stellar evolution, stellar seismology, compact stellar remnants, gravity waves, neutron star emission, gamma-ray bursters, origin and evolution of galaxies, active galaxies and quasars, cosmology, and stellar and Big Bang nucleosynthesis.