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 visits as 2019 Sturm Lecturer
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.
Astronomy Grad Student Receives Award from the American Astronomical Society
We are pleased to announce that Jessica Klusmeyer, a second year graduate student in our MA program, received a Chambliss Student Achievement Award from the American Astronomical Society at its 233rd meeting in Seattle, WA in January, 2019. The award recognizes her outstanding poster presentation at the meeting and her ability to discuss the research underlying it with professional astronomers who serve as judges. We note that Jessica was competing in the graduate division against many more senior graduate students enrolled in Ph.D. programs around the country. This is a wonderful achievement and we are very proud of her work and deserved recognition. Jessica’s research poster was entitled “A Deep Search for Five Molecules in the Debris Disk around 49 Ceti”. Her research advisor is Professor Meredith Hughes and she had a number of co-authors, including former Wesleyan post-doctoral fellow Kevin Flaherty.
The Seattle Meeting of the American Astronomical Society
It was amazing to see how many Wesleyan folks, past and present, were a part of the 233rd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle. Here is just a partial list of contributors and attendees I ran into. Apologies to those I missed! Please add additional names and pics below.
Current Staff and Students: Roy Kilgard, Michael Henderson, Allison Quintana, Jessica Klusmeyer, Ismael Mirales, Anthony Santini
Recent Grads: Hannah Fritze, Aylin Garcia Soto, Prajwal Niraula
Recent Summer Students: Karina Cooper, Sadie Coffin, Aleezah Ali, Katie Chapman, Diego Garcia
Alumni: Amy Steele, Nicole Arulanantham, Colin Littlefield, Mark Popinchalk, Marshall Johnson, Emily Leitner, Anna Williams, Ken Rumstay, Taft Armandroff, Phil Choi, Anil Seth, Evan Tingle, Diana Windemuth, Trevor Dorn-Wallenstein, Clara Moskowitz
Former Staff: Vicki Sarajedini, John Cannon
Watching the eclipse from the top of the world
When I learned that a meeting of my division of the American Astronomical Society would be held in the path of totality of the August 21st eclipse, I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Having never been to Idaho, my family and I planned a winding trip from Salt Lake City through Twin Falls and on to Sun Valley, where the meeting is being held.
On the morning of the eclipse, we woke to beautiful blue skies. We took the Challenger Ski Lift 3,000 feet up to the 9,100 foot summit of Bald Mountain, our viewing location for the eclipse. Sun Valley is near the southern edge of the 70-mile wide path of totality, so we would only get about a minute of darkness. With such a short eclipse, I planned on taking zero photos of the moment itself.
The moment of totality is indescribable. As an astronomer, I knew that I would see the corona–the Sun’s tenuous outer atmosphere–but I wasn’t prepared for how it would make me feel. One of the things I’ve always loved most about astronomy is the beauty of the universe. You don’t have to know about stellar evolution to appreciate the arcing tendrils of a supernova remnant. But so many astronomical images are not what the objects look like to our eyes. The corona is different. It’s as magnificent as the best pictures of it you’ve ever seen, but the only way to see it is to be in a tiny geographic area at exactly the right moment… and get really lucky with the weather. I took a brief moment to look around the sky and see Venus and a few bright stars in the daytime sky–always there but hidden by the light of day.
And then, with a flash of light on its edge, the Sun returned. All the emotion, the elation, the joy came pouring out. Everyone was hugging and crying, high-fiving and whooping. It’s a remarkable coincidence of nature that our Moon and Sun are nearly the exact same size in the sky. Were the Moon larger or closer to the Earth, we would still have eclipses but the magic of the corona would be obscured. Any smaller or further away, and all eclipses would be partial. To experience such a rare cosmic event from such a beautiful place in the world was humbling and awe-inspiring.
And now the work begins. I will spend the next few days at my conference. Learning, working with collaborators, sharing results, but the conversation will always turn to the eclipse.
Solar Eclipse Viewing at VVO, August 21st starting at 1pm
Come to the Van Vleck Observatory on August 21st, 2017, to see the partial eclipse of the Sun! We may not be in the narrow path of totality, but we’ll still be able to see 65% of the Sun disappear. We will have telescopes set up at 1pm. The eclipse begins around 1:20pm with mid-eclipse falling at ~2:40pm.
In addition to telescopes and eclipse glasses for safely viewing the Sun, you can also tour our historical exhibition and see images from the 1925 solar eclipse that passed directly over Wesleyan and learn about Wesleyan’s expedition to New Hampshire for the 1932 eclipse.
You can read about the 1925 eclipse here.
2017 Sturm Lecture
The 2017 Sturm Memorial Lecture
MAPPING THE UNIVERSE WITH THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY
Speaker: Dr. Daniel Eisenstein, Harvard University
Date: Monday, April 3, 2017, 8:00PM
Where: Ring Family Performing Arts Hall, Wesleyan University
Reception and telescope viewing at the Van Vleck Observatory to follow the lecture.
Celebrating Van Vleck Observatory’s 100th Birthday!
On June 16, 2016, one hundred years to the day of the dedication of Van Vleck Observatory, the Astronomy Department hosted a Centennial Symposium and reception. Over one hundred people — about 1/3 alumni, 1/3 current Wesleyan staff and students, and 1/3 community members, including Astronomical Society of Greater Hartford members, attended. The Symposium program is available here. At the reception, we were treated to music of the early 1900’s by the West End String Quartet and Centeni-ale from our master brewer Roy Kilgard. Costumed visitors from the past, including such luminaries as George Ellery Hale and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (played, respectively, by Professor of Physics Lutz Huwel and Professor of Romance Languages Ellen Nerenberg) mingled among us. For more information and pictures visit the University blog.
See Mae Jemison Give the Sturm Lecture on April 19th at 8pm!
Mae Jemison is the 2016 Sturm Lecturer and will be giving a public lecture next Tuesday, April 19th at 8pm in the Ring Family Performing Arts Hall (formerly the CFA Hall). Her talk is entitled, “Exploring the Frontiers of Science and Human Potential”. She is a former astronaut, served in the Peace Corp, is a physician by training, majored in engineering and African and Afro-American Studies at Stanford, is a fierce advocate for STEM education, and is currently leading the 100 Year Starship Project… and that is just some of the things she has done.
Tell your friends, family, classmates, and encourage all to come see her speak. There will be a reception following the public lecture at the Observatory (and the telescopes will be open if it is clear).
Capturing a moment that wasn’t
Late last autumn, while looking over the calendar of events for VVO’s centennial celebration, I noticed something penciled in for February 6th by Michaela Fisher, one of the students working on our history project. “Frederick Slocum’s Birthday Party.” What should we do to celebrate the 143rd birthday of VVO’s first director? Then I remembered another idea from a brainstorming session last summer…
That’s how I found myself on the evening of February 6th, in the Observatory, wearing a vintage 3-piece suit, and preparing to recreate a 1916-era astronomy lecture for the public.
Assisting me in this endeavor was my colleague Professor Amrys Williams from Wes’s history department, who jumped at the chance to play dress-up.
Our observatory is full of many wonders from the past, so it was relatively easy to put together a talk from original lantern slides, many of which were photos taken by Slocum himself during his time at Yerkes Observatory before coming to Wesleyan. We also used our circa 1910 Bausch and Lomb lantern slide projector, although we replaced its original 500 Watt incandescent bulb with a modern 40 Watt LED light source. (The chamber in which the original bulb sat is lined with asbestos. You know, for safety.)
As we dimmed the lights, Amrys set the stage for the audience with colorful tales from early 20th century life in Middletown and beyond. The show was about to begin.
1916 was an interesting era in astronomy–although Einstein’s work on relativity had recently been published, the connections with the universe were not yet made. We were a few years away from the groundbreaking work of Cecilia Payne, which heralded in the era of modern astrophysics. Planetary science was in its infancy. And the realization that the great spiral nebulae were in fact separate galaxies at tremendous distance was only beginning to be considered. Trying to place ourselves in this era, even for a few minutes, is a powerful reflection on the progress that has been made in the last century, both in astronomy and in society as a whole. Lest the audience get too philosophical, we provided cake!
Many thanks to Cybele Moon and Christian Milik from Wesleyan’s costume shop, the Astronomical Society of Greater Hartford for operating telescopes and generally being awesome, and the Under Connecticut Skies team.