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.

Department faculty and students have made use primarily of national facilities for their observations, 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. Teaching and research facilities include a 24-inch telescope with CCD spectrograph at the Morehead Observatory on campus, and the PROMPT array of six 0.4 m U- to IR-band telescopes on Cerro Tololo in Chile that are accessed remotely in a queue through the SkyNet Robotic Telescope Network interface that was developed at UNC.

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

In 2003, the 4.1-meter SOAR Telescope came on line atop Cerro Pachon in northern Chile, with UNC faculty and students receiving 61 nights of observing time per year, accessed remotely from a control room in Chapman Hall. In 2006, the 10-meter Southern African Large Telescope began operations, and UNC has 11 nights of observing time per year in queued mode.

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, and robotic telescope design and construction.

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.