Of the three units involved in Astronomy at UofT, the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics is the one that handles all the teaching.

But there’s more to the Department than undergraduate classes:

In this video, Professor Howard Yee, Chair of the Department, talks about the 10 professors, 10 post-docs and 35 grad students in the Department.

He tells us about their research on galaxies and how they cluster together, on star and planet formation, and on experiments that send telescopes flying around the poles on balloons.

Since 1984, the University of Toronto has been hosting the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), which has grown to comprise 6 professors and 25 post-docs.

CITA astrophysicists perform advanced research; they also train graduate and undergraduate students.

Among various topics, CITA’s professors and many postdocs construct models of the Universe’s beginnings and simulate gravity waves from the coming together of black holes —from pen-and-paper computations to programming on video cards.

The success of this institute on the theoretical side of astrophysics provided some of the inspiration for the creation of the Dunlap Institute —whose aims are more practical: astronomical instrumentation, astrophysical observations and science outreach.