Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology

The Astronomy, Astrophysics, Cosmology Group is among the best in the country and very highly regarded internationally. It has a distinguished and energetic team of faculty members. In addition, the UVic Astronomy group maintains strong collaborative working relations with members of the nearby Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics, whose staff supervise graduate students, further expanding the group's expertise. The presence in Victoria of both the Astronomy Group at UVic and the HIA gives Victoria one of the largest concentration of astronomers in Canada, and the vibrancy of this community offers undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdoctoral and visiting researchers with a diversity of research opportunities, ranging from theoretical, observational and computational cosmology to adaptive optics, from stellar structure to active galactic nuclei, from the optical to the submillimeter, from supernovae to astronomical instrumentation, unparalleled elsewhere in Canada.

Major astronomical resources available to faculty and students include access to the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the 8-meter Gemini-North on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and Gemini-South on Cerro Pachon, Chile. The faculty, staff and students have also been very successful at securing observing time using other major observatories including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Very Large Array in New Mexico, Kitt Peak in Arizona, the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in the Chilean Andes, etc. Finally, the optical telescopes of the nearby telescopes at the Herzberg Institute for Astrophysics are also available for use.

For more information about the research program and the people involved, see the Astronomy Research Centre (ARC). 

ARC also hosts a 6-year NSERC CREATE graduate training program New Technologies for Canadian Observatoires (NTCO) that is led by the University of Victoria, and includes the University of Toronto/ Dunlap Institute, Laval University/ Observatoire Mont Megantic, and McMaster University, as well as the National Research Council Herzberg. Further details of the program and application information can be found here.