Recent news about the Astronomy Department
Virginia Film Festival at the McCormick Observatory
The Virginia Film Festival held a special film series at McCormick Observatory, kicking off the "Aliens" themed festival with a 70th anniversary rebroadcast of the Orson Wells "War of the Worlds" radio program in the Dome Room of the Observatory. On Oct 31st, 1930, the night after the original broadcast, McCormick Observatory was opened to the public to allow students and Charlottesville residents to see that there was no alien activity on Mars.
The Observatory was open to the public for every night of the Festival from 7-10pm, hosting a series of films in the specially-created "McCormick Observatory Microcinema." The series featured three programs of experimental and independent films about space curated by luminaries of the avant-garde film world including Craig Baldwin, Jeanne Liotta and Ed Halter.
In addition, legendary underground filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar presented four of their most hyperbolic alien invasion spectacles, Blips, Ascension of the Demonoids, Death Quest of the Ju-Ju Cults, and Secrets of the Shadow World.
Rachael Beaton guest blogs for the Discovery Channel
Graduate Student Rachael Beaton was recently invited to be a guest blogger on the David Chandler‘s Next Generation blog on Discovery Channel‘s Discovery Space website. You can read her blog entry about observing from a graduate student perspective.
Phil Arras wins UVA FEST award
Phil Arras has won a Fund for Excellence in Science and Technology (FEST) Distinguished Young Investigator Award from UVa’s Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies for his proposal "Physics of Hot Jupiters".
Triplespec First Light on APO 3.5-m
Triplespec, an R~3500 NIR spectrograph with simultaneous wavelength coverage between 0.9-2.4 microns, was recently completed by the Astronomy Department’s Virginia Astronomical Instrumentation Laboratory and the Department Shops. Three copies of Triplespec were built, the other two by Cornell/JPL and Caltech, for Palomar and Keck Observatories. Triplespec on the Apache Point Observatory 3.5-m saw first light on the evening of March 19, 2008, and one of the first targets was Saturn. The image in the top left corner shows the placement of the spectrograph slit on Saturn and the rings, while the larger image shows the resulting infrared spectrum of both the rings and the atmosphere of Saturn.
Astronomy Graduate Students Excel at UVa Research Exhibition
Astronomy Graduate Students Geneviève de Messières, Joleen Miller and Gail Zasowski recently participated in the Eighth Annual Huskey Graduate Research Exhibition at UVa, and all three were among the top prize winners in the Physical Sciences and Mathematics category. Miller and Zasowski received the two first place awards for their oral presentations ("Our Dusty Galaxy: Mapping the Dust Structure of the Milky Way" by Zasowksi and "Red Giant Rapid Rotators: Mild Mannered Stars or Secret Planet Eaters?" by Miller). Among the posters in the Physical Sciences and Mathematics, de Messières was awarded fourth prize for her poster on "Spitzer Mid-Infrared Spectra of Selected Galaxy Cluster Cooling Flows" (work for which she was also awarded a prize at the AAS in January).
LBT First Binocular Light
The Large Binocular Telescope has successfully achieved first “binocular” light. UVa is a partner in the LBT, which has two 8.4-meter mirrors that combine to give the light gathering power of a single 11.8-meter mirror, making the LBT the largest single telescope in the world. Eventually, the two separate mirrors will work to combine the light interferometrically, and the LBT will have the resolution of a telescope equivalent to a 22.8-meter mirror (far exceeding that of the Hubble Space Telescope).
This image of NGC 2770 (by Vincenzo Testa of Rome Observatory) was made by combining images taken in three different filters. The total observation time was about 12 minutes.
Phil Arras named 2008 Sloan Fellow
Phil Arras has been named a Sloan Fellow for 2008 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in chemistry, biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics in the US and Canada. Phil is the only Sloan Fellow named at UVa this year, and is one of only 23 named in physics in the US and Canada.
Greg Black images asteroid as it passes Earth
Greg Black, working with scientists at NASA/JPL and Arecibo Observatory, has obtained radar images of Asteroid 2007 TU24 on January 29th as the 250 meter diameter asteroid passed within half a million kilometers of the Earth (about 1.4 times as far as the Moon is from the Earth). Using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, they sent a radar pulse which then bounced off of the asteroid and was detected by NRAO’ Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.
Geneviève de Messières wins Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award
Geneviève de Messières won a Chambliss Astronomy
Achievement Student Award at the January 2008 meeting of the American
Astronomical Society in Austin, TX for her research poster on Spitzer
Space Telescope observations of galaxy cluster cooling flows. At right is a Chandra X-ray image of the cooling flow cluster Abell 1835, one of 8 cooling flow clusters she investigated in the Infrared with the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Graduate students visit/train on telescope facilities
Graduate and undergraduate students in Steven Majewski’s
Astronomical Techniques class spent 10 days in November visiting
telescope facilities in New Mexico and Arizona. These included facilities
to which UVa astronomers have direct access: the Apache Point Observatory, the Large Binocular
Telescope, the Vatican
Advanced Technology Telescope, and the 10-m Submillimeter Telescope. The
students also visited the Kitt Peak
National Observatory, the Very
Large Array of the National Radio
Astronomy Observatory, and the Steward Observatory Mirror
Lab, which made the mirrors for many of the optical telescopes
visited. The
trip included three nights of observing student projects on the APO
3.5-m telescope (shown at left).
Amy Reines takes second place in NRAO/AUI Image Contest
Amy Reines won second place in the Third
NRAO/AUI Radio Astronomy Image Contest. Her
image of the local starburst galaxy NGC 4449 combines radio imaging
from NRAO’s Very Large Array and optical imaging from NASA’s
Hubble Space Telescope. Newborn super star clusters are seen in the
radio image (blue). These massive clusters contains tens to hundreds of
thousands of stars; the young stars in these clusters produce hot
ionized gas which is detectable at radio wavelengths. The Hubble image
(in yellow) shows the distribution of the visible starlight.
Kelsey Johnson awarded Packard Fellowship
Kelsey Johnson was one of twenty fellows selected this year for the prestigious David & Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering. The term of the fellowship is 5 years. Kelsey joins Steve Majewski to become the second Packard Fellow in the Astronomy Department.
Trinh Thuan awarded the Grand Prix Moron de l’Académie Française
The French Academy has awarded its prestigious Gran Prix Moron to Trinh Thuan for his most recent book for a general readership, "The Ways of Light: Physics and Metaphysics of Light and Darkness" (in French).
The academy’s Gran Prix Moron recognizes the distinguished philosophical work of an author involving a new ethic or esthetics. It is roughly equivalent to the American Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award, and has over the years been presented to distinguished authors in French, including statesmen and scholars.
Saturn’s Moon Enceladus a "Graffiti Artist"
Astronomers have found that Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn, is a
"cosmic graffiti artist," pelting the surfaces of at least 11 other moons of Saturn with ice particles sprayed from its spewing surface geysers. UVa Research Scientist Anne Verbiscer led the collaboration which made this discovery, using the Hubble Space Telescope, and reported in the Feb 9 issue of Science. The BBC, National Geographic, New Scientist, Spaceflight Now and Space.com have the story.
UVa joins the Astrophysical Research Consortium
At the beginning of 2007 the University of Virginia joined the Astrophysical Research Consortium as a member institution. ARC operates the Apache Point Observatory. The Department’s Instrumentation Lab is currently constructing an Infrared spectrograph, TripleSpec, which will operate on the APO 3.5-m telescope.
APOGEE selected for inclusion in "SDSS III" Proposal
The ARC Board of Governors has endorsed the UVa-led APOGEE (The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment) as one of the four projects to be proposed for the SDSS III project on the Sloan 2.5-m telescope at Apache Point Observatory after completion of "Sloan II" operations in 2008. APOGEE will use a high-resolution, infrared multi-fiber spectrograph (to be built at UVa) for a detailed survey of the dynamics and chemistry of the Milky Way.
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New Telescope under construction at Fan Mountain Observatory
Norfolk State University is building a 24-inch Robotic Telescope at Fan
Mountain Observatory, for monitoring the optical afterglow of Gamma-ray Bursts. UVa Research Scientist David McDavid is the liaison between NSU and UVa for this project. He is working to bring this telescope to first light, later this year.
Skrutskie awarded the James Craig Watson Medal
Mike Skrutskie was awarded the James Craig Watson Medal by The National Academy of Sciences for his ’monumental work in developing and completing the Two Micron All-Sky Survey, thus enabling a thrilling variety of explorations in astronomy and astrophysics’.
Enormous stellar halo seen around the Andromeda Galaxy
UVa Astronomers Steve Majewski and Ricky Patterson, undergraduate (now graduate student) Rachael Beaton, and Ph.D. James Ostheimer, along with other colleagues have found an enormous halo of stars around the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), These findings suggest that Andromeda is as much as five times larger than astronomers had previously thought.
Johnson wins NSF CAREER and UVA FEST awards
Kelsey Johnson won a NSF CAREER award for her proposal Probing the Birth of Super Star Clusters. The research is aimed at gaining a better understanding of star cluster formation, in particular the formation of so-called extragalactic “super star clusters”. The broader impact of the project is focused on K-12 science teacher development, as well as graduate student teacher training.
She has also won a Fund for Excellence in Science and Technology (FEST) Distinguished Young Investigator Award from UVa’s Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies.
