Last week, five UNT Astronomy representatives from UNT Physics traveled to Seattle to join the annual American Astronomical Society meeting, one of the largest gatherings of its kind in the world.

During the event, grad student Andrea Marlar presented the preliminary results from her NASA-funded Chandra project, which focuses on understanding the growth of supermassive black holes. Brandon Matthews, also a UNT graduate student, presented the second installment of the results from the long-term Gemini project funded by the National Science Foundation. For this project the team was awarded 350 hours of observing time at Gemini North in Hawaii, one of the world's largest telescopes, to observe more than 400 distant quasars and obtain their infrared spectrum. Both Andrea and Brandon are supervised by Associate Profesor Ohad Shemmer, who was also in attendance. This was the second time these two outstanding students presented at the AAS meeting (the first was the summer 2018 meeting in Denver, CO).

Rafes Urban Astronomy Director Ron DiIulio and Observatory Manager Preston Starr were also in attendance, running the UNT Astronomy booth and interacting with researchers and astronomers from across the globe.

First established in 1899, this was the 233rd meeting of the prestigious American Astronomical Society, whose mission is to enhance and share humanity's scientific understanding of the universe. To find out more about the American Astronomical Society, visit https://aas.org.