Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics

Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics
Name	Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics
Location	10892 Le Conte Avenue, Los Angeles, California
Established	2009
Architect	Kevin Roche, Steven Ehrlich
Owner	University of California, Los Angeles
Type	Research institute, observatory

Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics is a research complex at the University of California, Los Angeles housing faculty and laboratories tied to observational and theoretical astrophysics. The center hosts faculty associated with the Department of Physics and Astronomy, the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, and connects to national observatories and space missions. It supports collaborations with major facilities and agencies to pursue research on exoplanets, cosmology, stellar evolution, and high-energy astrophysics.

History

The center was conceived during expansion plans involving the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy, and donors including the Cahill Foundation and private philanthropists active in Los Angeles cultural projects such as the Getty Center and the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Planning invoked partnerships with the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and advisory committees drawn from institutions like California Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. Groundbreaking followed consultations with architects experienced on projects including the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The facility opened in the late 2000s and has since hosted visiting scholars from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Princeton University, and Institute for Advanced Study.

Architecture and Facilities

The building, designed with input from firms linked to projects at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, features climate-controlled laboratories, clean rooms used for instrumentation analogous to those at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and computational clusters comparable to systems at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Interior planning drew inspiration from laboratories at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and lecture spaces mirroring venues at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. Facilities include offices for faculty affiliated with the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, meeting rooms used by visiting groups from the American Astronomical Society, and seminar halls that host panels with representatives from the European Southern Observatory and the Max Planck Society.

Research and Scientific Programs

Research programs at the center span observational campaigns tied to missions like Kepler (spacecraft), James Webb Space Telescope, and Hubble Space Telescope, theoretical studies linked to frameworks developed at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and instrumentation projects coordinated with teams at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Faculty engage in cosmology programs overlapping with collaborations such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Dark Energy Survey, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope consortium. Stellar and exoplanet science connects to groups at Caltech, MIT, and the Carnegie Institution for Science, while high-energy astrophysics projects interface with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, and ground arrays like VERITAS and Very Large Array partners.

Education and Public Outreach

Educational activities integrate graduate curricula with the UCLA Graduate Division, undergraduate programs coordinated with the College of Letters and Science (UCLA), and postdoctoral fellowships patterned after awards from the Simons Foundation and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Public outreach initiatives involve planetarium-style lectures inspired by programming at the Griffith Observatory, community events coordinated with the Los Angeles Public Library, and workshops in collaboration with educators from the California Science Center and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The center hosts visiting school groups via partnerships with programs funded by the Lasker Foundation and public lectures that have featured speakers affiliated with the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences.

Notable Instruments and Observatories

The center supports instrumentation development for ground and space observatories including contributions to spectrographs used on Keck Observatory, adaptive optics systems akin to those at Gemini Observatory, and detector development related to programs at the European Space Agency and NASA JPL. Faculty have led hardware and software projects feeding data from surveys such as the Pan-STARRS project and instrumentation collaborations with the Subaru Telescope and the Magellan Telescopes. The facility's laboratories also work on prototype sensors resembling devices used in the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and prototypes for future missions proposed to European Southern Observatory committees and NASA Science Mission Directorate panels.

Affiliations and Collaborations

Affiliations include formal ties with the University of California system, collaborative institutes like the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, and research networks engaging the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. International collaborations link the center with teams at Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Observatoire de Paris, and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. Funding and joint projects often involve agencies and organizations such as the National Science Foundation, NASA, the European Commission, and private foundations including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Category:University of California, Los Angeles buildings and structures