About the Department

Department Chair: P.G. Martin
chair@astro.utoronto.ca

Associate Chair, Graduate: R. Abraham grad.sec@astro.utoronto.ca
Associate Chair, Undergraduate: R. Carlberg ungrad.sec@astro.utoronto.ca

Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
University of Toronto
50 St. George Street Room 101
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5S 3H4

We are located at the Astronomy and Astrophysics Building (AB) (map) on the St. George Campus.

PH: (416) 978-2016 FAX: (416) 971-7287
info@astro.utoronto.ca

General Information

The University of Toronto is the largest university in Canada with 2500 graduate faculty and more than 9000 full and part-time graduate students. Metropolitan Toronto has a population of 3,000,000 people who provide a rich multicultural mix and create an interesting and stimulating environment outside the University.

The Department offers Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees, outlined below, and cooperates with CITA and the Department of Physics to offer a Collaborative Master of Science Programme in Astrophysics.

The Department is actively engaged in a wide range of observational and theoretical research on solar system dynamics, stars, stellar systems, the interstellar medium, the Galaxy, galaxies, quasars, clusters of galaxies, cosmology, and problems in general relativity. The Department has close ties with the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), and Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (DIAA) which is located in the same building. This association enables our students to work and consult with leading researchers who are appointed to or are visiting CITA and DIAA. In total, there are approximately 150 faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and staff in the Department of Astronomy, CITA and DIAA. Students also benefit from direct interactions with the broad range of external speakers brought in for the weekly Department and CITA seminar programs and colloquia.

There are usually about 35 graduate students in the Department, coming to Toronto from around the world with a wide range of academic backgrounds, but generally with a solid background in Mathematics and Physics. The Graduate Astronomy Students Association (GASA) represents student interests at faculty meetings and sponsors a lively social and athletic programme.

Research Facilities

Faculty and students enjoy access to the Magellan 6.5-m telescopes and the Dupont 2.5-m telescope at Las Campanas under an instrumentation development collaboration with the Carnegie Observatories. The Herschel Space Observatory and Planck was launched in 2008, and soon to will come the James Webb Space
Telescope, ALMA, and the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT). We have an active experimental programme using telescopes on long-duration stratospheric balloons telescopes for cosmological and Galactic research.

We also use the major optical, radio, and satellite observing facilities of the world. Of particular importance are the national facilities: the Canada-France-Hawaii optical telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell radio telescope, and the Gemini telescopes located at the world's finest observing sites. Applicants from Canadian institutions have preferred access. An endowment fund supports student travel for observations and conferences.

The Department also operates a small radio telescope on the roof of the Mclennan Lab for use by undergraduates on the same basis as the rooftop optical telescopes. This telescope has an aperture of about 2 meters and is tuned to the 21 cm line of neutral hydrogen. The telescope is operated by a modest pc, and can be operated remotely. SRT (Small Radio Telescope) manual (Internal use only).

Other Resources

The theoretical computing environment at the University of Toronto is particularly strong. In addition to departmental computers, we share a high-performance parallel-computing centre for theoretical astrophysics with CITA. This facility has been used to carry out some of the largest, most accurate N-body simulations done to date, although it has many other applications, ranging from the dynamics of molecules to the dynamics of the universe. The Department and CITA are recognized major centres in the numerical study of dynamical systems ranging from hydrogen molecules, to comets in the solar system, to star clusters, to spiral waves in galaxies, to colliding galaxies, to the large scale clustering of galaxies. Various workers at the University of Toronto have developed some of the most powerful numerical techniques in use today. Major software packages from NASA, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, and elsewhere are maintained on the departmental computers.

The offices of the Department on the St. George campus house the Departmental library, the largest astronomy and astrophysics library in Canada. The collection has extensive holdings ranging from the old publications of small European observatories to computer-readable star and galaxy catalogs. Specialized material includes complete sets of the Palomar and ESO photographic sky surveys as well as the Space Telescope and Hipparcos digitized sky surveys. Computerized data bases allow quick recall of catalogued material.