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On Friday, May 26th, after 43 years at Wesleyan, and a two year delay due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, we were finally able to celebrate Bill Herbst’s retirement from Wesleyan! Thank you to all the friends, family, faculty, colleagues, current, and past students who were able to attend this special event.

About Prof. Bill Herbst

Bill grew up in southern New Jersey and was an undergraduate at Princeton University, where he majored in Astrophysics and graduated with High Honors. He received his Ph.D. in 1974 from the University of Toronto. He taught for two years at York University in Toronto and then accepted a position in Washington, D. C., as a Carnegie Fellow at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), a branch of the Carnegie Institution. In 1978, he joined the faculty at Wesleyan University where he rose to the rank of Professor and was the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy from 1991 until his retirement in 2021. His current title is John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus.

He is an astronomer interested in star formation, planet formation, meteorites, chondrules, T Tauri stars and the formation of the Earth. He observes and interprets the light variations of T Tauri stars, objects that are similar in mass to the Sun but at an age (< 10 Myr) when their planetary systems were still forming. This research makes use of telescopes at Van Vleck Observatory (VVO) on the Wesleyan campus, other facilities around the world, and space telescopes. An object of particular interest whose unique behavior was discovered at VVO is known as KH 15D, and has been shown to be a “proto-Tatooine” object — that is, a binary star system orbited by a ring of material that may one day consolidate to form planets orbiting a double star like the fictional home world of Luke and Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars. More recently, has become interested in chondrules and chondritic meteorites, which are the most primitive samples of the solar nebula that reach the Earth’s surface on their own. In collaboration with James P. Greenwood of Wesleyan’s E&ES department, he has developed a theory of chondritic meteorite formation that addresses a long-standing problem in cosmochemisty, the origin of the chondrules. Their theory correctly predicted the density of the rocks on Ryugu, the first asteroid from which a substantial sample of rocks was returned, and also correctly predicted that these rocks would contain few, if any, chondrules.

Speakers

We welcomed to campus Catrina Hamilton-Drager, Joshua Winn, and Nicole Arulanantham to give seminars with Wesleyan’s Jim Greenwood. These speakers highlighted various topics that Bill had worked on during his time at Wesleyan. Bill ended the seminar series with remarks about his time at Wesleyan and his research during his time here and beyond.

It’s Not Goodbye…

Although Bill has officially retired from Wesleyan, he is still active in our department and we are happy he kept an office in VVO. He comes in from time to time to fill us in on his travels and what he is working on now.

This fall as part of the Radio Astronomy class, our majors and MA students had the opportunity to travel to Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.  After enduring the 9-hour drive each way, we were let loose on the 40-ft telescope and were also allocated a big chunk of time on the 20-meter telescope.  We toured the receiver lab and the operating room for the Green Bank Telescope, and saw some of the new/experimental facilities like the CHIME outrigger.  The students even managed to survive ~36 hours in the National Radio Quiet Zone without their devices and connection to the outside world!  The Green Bank site was peaceful, beautiful, and awe-inspiring, and several of the students saw the Milky Way for the first time.

Wesleyan’s astronomy department has had a pair of old Starlab inflatable planetariums for many years, but in 2019 we added a new digital planetarium to our arsenal… which we used for only one semester before the pandemic hit and packing dozens of children into close proximity in a little bubble of air started to seem like not such a great idea for a while.  This year, thanks to data on air exchange rates in inflatable planetariums from colleagues in the UK, along with an awesome level of cooperation from our community on wearing masks in the planetarium environment, we were finally able to bring back planetarium presentations for our Middletown community!

This semester we opened the planetarium for several events: a Scout group visit to the observatory, two days’ worth of expeditions to Macdonough School, a planetarium night at the local public library, and one more school visit.  Students in our Astronomical Pedagogy seminar worked all semester to learn how to use the planetarium equipment, to understand developmental expectations and educational standards for children of different ages, to think about the role of storytelling in science communication, and to practice and give each other feedback on their presentations.  The results were awesome!  Kids in grades K-5 learned about gravity, seasons, the day/night cycle, Morse code, and so much more — our students were pros at getting the kids excited to learn more about space.

This semester our Astronomical Pedagogy seminar is doing “Sidewalk Science” in collaboration with Middletown’s Russell Library during the month of October.  We’ve been collecting questions about space from library patrons and Middletown residents, and each week a team of students chalks responses on the sidewalk in front of the library.

Check out our first round of chalkings, and if you’re in the Middletown area, please visit the web form and submit your questions about space!  Photos of the chalkings will be posted on the library’s and observatory’s social media.

We are living through a tumultuous moment in our nation’s history: one that has both caused and brought to light a great deal of pain, anguish, and suffering, especially for people of color in the United States.  This moment presents an opportunity to take a stand and renew our commitment to actively work against the racism and violence against people of color that permeates the fabric of our society as well as our scientific community.  We stand in solidarity with the protestors insisting on an end to violence against individuals and communities of color, a dismantling of systemic institutional racism, and reform of police. We unequivocally affirm that black lives matter.  We acknowledge that the impact of recent events, particularly the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others, is disproportionately heavy for people of color in our community, and affirm our support and care for those most directly affected by racism and the efforts to combat it.

We acknowledge that, together with all segments of our society, science has contributed and continues to contribute to the history of violence and oppression of Black and Brown Americans.  We acknowledge that systematic barriers to the full participation of scientists of color exist today, woven into the fabric of the field of astronomy, and that we must actively work to dismantle them and create opportunities for scientists of color.  Our community of learning and discovery requires us to actively work to build an anti-racist organization and support our community members that bear the additional burden of inequity in our society.  Here are a few ways that our department pledges to do some of that work in the coming months and years:

– While the physics GRE has always been optional for applicants to our MA program in astronomy, this year for the first time we will not accept scores at all.

– The astronomy faculty are building and expanding upon modules that explicitly weave STEM equity and inclusion and scientific ethics into the astronomy curriculum.  Two examples include the ethics component of Astronomical Pedagogy seminar, which will be expanded this fall, and the CIS321 seminar on STEM equity and inclusion, which will be taught for the third time this fall.  The latter course explicitly encourages students to design evidence-based initiatives to increase STEM equity and inclusion at Wesleyan, in collaboration with existing groups and structures, and includes both logistical faculty support and funding for those efforts.  We welcome and encourage all members of the Wesleyan astronomy community to join us in these endeavors.

– We will reignite the conversations that have taken place in our department as part of our Diversity Journal Club series, which has lapsed for the past two years, to provide a regular departmental forum to discuss issues related to STEM equity and inclusion, particularly anti-racist efforts, and to plan future action we can take as a department.

– We have benefited from discussions in the department of underrepresentation in astronomy which were driven by visiting researchers who spoke to these issues. This academic year, we will seek to bring in a speaker to give a department-wide seminar on anti-racism in astronomy, with appropriate recognition and compensation for their time and expertise.

– We are committed to a sustained community presence, particularly in K-12 schools that serve demographics underrepresented in astronomy, as part of our public outreach in astronomy.  We will also redouble our efforts to invite children and parents of color into our observatory.

– As individuals, we reaffirm our commitment to dismantling racist structures in our broader Wesleyan campus, our home communities, and our families.

We acknowledge that these actions are a small part in an ongoing and evolving effort. Above all, we pledge to educate ourselves, to do the work of becoming a better and more equitable department, and to support and care for the safety and well being of all of our students and colleagues, but especially those most vulnerable to the systematic oppression embedded within science and our broader human society that we have been reminded of so vividly in recent weeks.

Bill Herbst
Meredith Hughes
Roy Kilgard
Ed Moran
Seth Redfield

As usual, our holiday party was a festive event, thanks to the incredible hard work of Linda Shettleworth and the good spirits of students, faculty and families. The food was great, the company was fabulous and a good time was had by all. It is so much fun for the elders to watch the next generation coming along. The pictures say it all!

Hundreds of students, staff and townsfolk joined us on Foss Hill Monday, Nov. 11, to observe a transit of Mercury. The sky cooperated for the most part and we were treated to a gorgeous view of this rare event. Thanks to Roy, Seth, John Sillasen, and all the Astronomy Dept. staff and students who helped out!

Eight Wesleyan undergraduates presented results of their summer research to the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium sponsored by the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium (KNAC). This year’s symposium was held on October 5 at Vassar College and attended by 125 astronomy students and faculty, primarily from the consortium colleges (Bryn Mawr, Colgate, Haverford, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Vassar, Wellesley, Wesleyan and Williams). KNAC was founded in 1990 to enhance research opportunities for astronomy students at smaller institutions in the northeast by sharing resources. Today it operates a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program funded by the National Science Foundation through a grant to Wesleyan. Astronomy majors Mason Tea and Rachel Marino and sophomores Alex Henton and Ava Nederlander gave oral presentations of their projects conducted on campus this summer. In addition, astronomy majors Fallon Konow, Hunter Vannier, Gil Garcia and Terra Ganey gave poster presentations of their summer research. The presenters were joined by an equal number of first and second-year students who went to hear the talks, participate in breakout sessions on various astronomical topics and network with potential future colleagues.

Planetary Science Group members Bill Herbst and Jim Greenwood have written an article for a general audience describing their interdisciplinary work on meteorites. Check it out in The Conversation.

Andrea Ghez, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA and the world’s leading expert on the black hole at the center of our galaxy visited the department for two days this week. She delivered the 2019 Sturm Lecture to an audience of 200+ on Tuesday night and gave a colloquium to the Astronomy Department on Wednesday. She also had breakfast and lunch meetings with astronomy department students and with the Wesleyan Women in Science program. Her visit was co-sponsored by the Center for Integrative Science. Ghez described her amazing studies of the stars orbiting the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way, showing how the work is testing General Relativity and challenging ideas of galaxy evolution.