For over a century, the diverse and talented students, staff, and faculty of the Steward Observatory and the Department of Astronomy have explored the Universe together and shared what we have learned with the entire world through our educational and outreach programs. The students and post-doctoral researchers we have trained, and our faculty, have helped prove the existence of dark matter, discovered that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, and made the first image of the event horizon of a massive black hole. We are the only University to have designed and built a major instrument for more than one of NASA’s great observatories. We currently operate many of the world’s leading and largest telescopes and are the host of the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab, the innovative source of the world’s largest mirrors for telescopes. Together with our partners, we are designing and building the next generation of giant space and ground based telescopes (including the Giant Magellan Telescope, with a 25m diameter primary mirror comprised of seven of our 8.4m mirrors) that will enable us, in the next decade, to search for signs of life on planets around distant stars and to study the time of the formation of first stars in our Universe.
