The Earth’s highest elevated continent offers a unique platform to study the starry skies and beyond. For decades, UChicago has participated in Antarctica’s community of researchers to explore the evolution of the earliest structures that form our galaxy, explore dark energy using the South Pole Telescope, and help tell the story of our planet through the measurement of glacier melt.
The Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics is committed to the development of innovative approaches that combine both physics and astronomy to further our understanding of the birth and earliest evolution of the Universe.
The South Pole Telescope is a 10-meter diameter microwave / millimeter / sub-millimeter wavelength telescope located at the NSF Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which is the best currently operational site on Earth for mm-wave survey observations due to its stable, dry atmosphere.
During a recent excursion to the icy plains of Antarctica, an international team of researchers discovered one of the largest meteorites ever found on the continent. Maria Valdes, a research scientist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and the University of Chicago who was part of the expedition team, has kept some of the material for her own analysis.
In a new study, scientists used observational data of the cosmic microwave background to explore the theoretical underpinnings of the standard cosmological model that describes the history of the universe over the past 14 billion years.
A group of University of Chicago scientists have released a landmark report on glacial geoengineering which represents the first public efforts by glaciologists to assess possible technological interventions that could help address catastrophic sea-level rise scenarios.
University of Chicago scientists at the South Pole Telescope help take historic image of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole.
Drilling into Taylor Glacier and extracting ice samples could help scientists flesh out our picture of the chain reactions that happen when the climate warms.
