U-M’s access to the Southern Sky is through our partnership in the twin 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes in Chile. U-M’s 10% share in this premier facility means students can undertake projects with long timelines and numerous targets. More than half of our PhD students from the last 10 years have done work here.
"
I was shocked at the access I had to the world’s best telescopes; I spent something like 100 nights at Magellan."
- Matt Walker, PhD ‘07
In addition, students interested in instrumentation can work with Professor Mario Mateo, who has just completed a major upgrade to his ground-breaking fiber spectrograph at Magellan. His original instrument yielded a 100-fold increase in the number of targets that could be sampled at a given time, and his new version is even more powerful, flexible, and efficient. As the major sky surveys generate new detections, Mateo’s spectrograph is well-positioned to follow up on their chemistry, temperature, and velocity and to search for and analyze exoplanets.
