“The really amazing thing about this research is that it changes the way astronomy has been conducted in the past,” said Don Winget, the director of CAPP and a professor in the Department of Astronomy. “There were a lot of things we thought we understood, or knew we didn’t understand in astrophysics. By re-creating those conditions and making real measurements in the laboratory, we’re changing how we think of not only astronomy as a field, but how we think of specific astronomical objects.”Traditional astrophysics has largely been an observational science, and experiments are usually conducted at magnitudes much smaller than those observed in the cosmos. This has often led to discrepancies between the experiments and observations, Winget said.These discrepancies have been noticed when calculating the mass of white dwarfs, which are the dense core remnants of “dead” stars. The mass often differs by 10 to 15 percent when measured using different methods. When astronomers try to use white dwarfs to calculate the ages of galaxies, this error translates to an uncertainty of a few billion years.The center will explore these discrepancies and seek to improve current models using data obtained from these experiments. The grant will support four graduate students and two postdoctoral researchers. The center also brings together experts in various areas of astrophysics from UT Austin, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Sandia National Laboratories.“Right away, we hit the ground running because we have these people involved, broadening our range of research,” Winget said. “With the center, we’re able to have these interactions and bring new people into laboratory astrophysics.”“Now, we’re going back and asking very fundamental questions,” Winget said. “Instead of doing calculations, we’re doing experiments and checking. We’re going to learn a lot of things we plan on learning, and we’re going to learn a lot of things that we had not planned on learning.”Watch to see more on the team making star stuff and how they inspired one artist's recent work.This press release originally appeared on McDonaldObservatory.org