Drexel is a recognized leader in astrophysics research, with both students and faculty contributing to the field. Learn more about our faculty’s current research in astrophysics below.

Astrophysics Research Topics

• Active Galactic Nuclei/Quasars
• Compact Binary Stars
• Cosmology
• Designing the "Petaflops" Computer
• Large-Scale Structure
• Numerical Hydrodynamics
• Parallel Computing
• Rotational Instabilities
• Star Clusters and Stellar Dynamics

Faculty Conducting Research in Astrophysics

	Contact	Specialization
	David Goldberg Associate Department Head for Undergraduate Studies; Professor Disque Hall 810 goldberg@drexel.edu	Theoretical and computational cosmology, extragalactic astrophysics, gravitational lensing, popular science writing
	Stephen L.W. McMillan Department Head; Professor Disque Hall 815 stephen.l.mcmillan@drexel.edu	Stellar dynamics, Computations of stellar systems
	Gordon T. Richards Professor; Chair, Faculty Senate Budget, Process, and Development (BP&D) Committee Disque 812 gordon.t.richards@drexel.edu	Quasars, active galactic nuclei, supermassive black holes, galaxy evolution, sky surveys, infrared/X-ray/radio astronomy
	Michael S. Vogeley Professor Disque Hall 811 vogeley@drexel.edu	Cosmology, Galaxy formation and evolution, Statistical analysis of large data sets, Active galactic nuclei

Current Astrophysics Research Projects

• Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• LSST
• Starlab

Astrophysics Research Facilities

• The Numerical Astrophysics Facility emphasizes theoretical and numerical studies of stars, star clusters, the early universe, galaxy distributions, cosmology modeling, and gravitational lensing. The facility employs special purpose high-performance computers, such as the Gravity Pipeline Engine (GRAPE), a new Beowulf cluster (128 processors, 128G RAM, 2 TB RAID disk), and a system using Graphics Processing Units to achieve computational speeds of up to a trillion floating point operations per second.
• The Joseph R. Lynch Observatory houses a 16-inch Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope equipped with SBIG CCD camera.
• Drexel faculty and students actively analyze data from the Sloan Digital Survey, which operates a 2.5-m telescope at Apache Point, New Mexico, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to be built in Chile (2020).