- The department occupies the fourth floor and part of the third floor of Swain Hall West, on East Third Street in Bloomington. The Physics Department occupies the remainder of the building, along with the library for mathematics, physics, astronomy, and computer science. Bloomington is a town of about 121,000 in the wooded rolling hills of southern Indiana. The Bloomington campus of Indiana University has about 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. Astronomy at Indiana University has a long history, beginning with Daniel Kirkwood in 1856.