Astronomy & Astrophysics at UofT

The Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics (DAA) offers both graduate and undergraduate courses and programmes as well as opportunities to engage in research at the forefront. The Department has close ties with the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA). These are now complemented by the new Dunlap Institute.

Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics (DAA)

Of the three units involved in Astronomy at UofT, the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics is the one that handles all the teaching.

But there's more to the Department than undergraduate classes:

In this video, Professor Howard Yee, Chair of the Department, talks about the 10 professors, 10 post-docs and 35 grad students in the Department.

He tells us about their research on galaxies and how they cluster together, on star and planet formation, and on experiments that send telescopes flying around the poles on balloons.

Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA)

Since 1984, the University of Toronto has been hosting the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), which has grown to comprise 6 professors and 25 post-docs.

CITA astrophysicists perform advanced research; they also train graduate and undergraduate students.

Among various topics, CITA's professors and many postdocs construct models of the Universe's beginnings and simulate gravity waves from the coming together of black holes —from pen-and-paper computations to programming on video cards.

The success of this institute on the theoretical side of astrophysics provided some of the inspiration for the creation of the Dunlap Institute —whose aims are more practical: astronomical instrumentation, astrophysical observations and science outreach.

The University of Toronto has earned a reputation as a world leader in theoretical, observational, computational, and experimental research in astrophysics and its close relative, planetary science, including extra-solar planets. The questions being addressed range from the origin of the universe to the evolution of planetary systems.

Current grand challenges include efforts to:

detect the predicted gravitational radiation from the inflationary epoch of the very early universe;
characterize the dark energy that dominates the universe;
find evidence for the first stars formed which re-ionized the previously neutral universe;
discover the nature of dark matter;
understand how, in the trace baryonic material, stars form out of diffuse gas and dust;
follow the growth of primordial fluctuations into present-day galaxies made luminous by stars;
characterize extra-solar planets and valuate the prospects of life elsewhere in the universe.

Faculty and students enjoy access to the Dupont 2.5-m telescope at Las Campanas under an instrumentation development collaboration with the Carnegie Observatories. Instrumentation is being developed for large optical/infrared telescopes and for nano-satellites. There is also an active experimental program using long-duration stratospheric balloons, with telescopes for cosmological and Galactic research.

Researchers also use the major optical, radio, and satellite observing facilities of the world. Of particular importance are the national facilities: the Canada-France-Hawaii optical telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell radio telescope, and the Gemini telescopes located at the world's finest observing sites.

Astrophysicists have partnered in acquiring the outstanding computing resources in SciNet, the UofT node in the pan-Canadian network of high-performance computing facilities. Thanks to a major $37.5 M award, SciNet is installing the most powerful academic computational facility outside the US. For the major users in astrophysics, SciNet enables both massive simulations of the evolving structure in the universe and analysis of the extensive surveys that our researchers are making to constrain it. There are approximately 100 faculty, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and staff in Astronomy and Astrophysics at UofT.