A brief history of the Universe (adapted from NASA).

The astrophysical studies at Xiamen University (hosted by the Department of Astronomy) use observations of multi-messenger signals (i.e., the radio, millimeter/submillimeter, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, X-ray and Gamma-ray emission, gravitational wave, neutrino, and time-domain facilities), theoretical modeling and numerical simulations to tackle the most important questions about the 14 billion-year-old universe. These questions include the formation and evolution of multi-scale astronomical objects and the physical laws under extreme conditions.

Current research areas include large-scale structure of the Universe, cosmological simulation, galaxy formation and evolution, intergalactic/circumgalactic/interstellar medium, active galactic nucleus and supermassive black hole, black-hole accretion at various mass scales, neutron star, stellar outburst phenomenon (i.e., gamma ray burst and fast radio burst), modeling and detection of dark matter, neutrino etc.

Our faculty also involves in a number of domestic and international collaborations/projects, including the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT), the Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph project (PFS), the East Asian Observatory’s James Clark Maxwell Telescope (JINGLE and MALATANG projects), the IRAM telescopes, the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) and future facilities the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST), the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the Taiji program in space gravitational physics, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), he Hot Universe Baryon Surveyor (HUBS), and the Census of warm-hot intergalactic medium, Accretion, and Feedback Explorer (CAFE).

The research areas are as follows.