Stellar Service at the Cline Observatory
You know you’re talking to a true scientist when he uses data to correct your clumsy attempts at polite small-talk. This is from one of my e-mail exchanges with astronomy instructor Tom English, of the Cline Observatory at Guilford Technical Community College:
Me: “The crowd for the public lecture on Friday night was, I think, the biggest one I've seen yet. Congratulations.”
TE: “I counted 419. The count for Michael Turner (2007) was 430. Robert Kirshner (1999) had even more than that. The room holds 474.”
That public lecture, opening the fall North Carolina Astronomers’ Meeting, was by NASA’s John C. Mather, whose work on the cosmic background radiation won him a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006. What that means is that he designed a satellite that measured, extremely precisely, the intensity of the microwaves left over from the Big Bang. Mather dislikes that phrase, by the way – he thinks that it conjures images of someone lighting a firecracker, which would then explode outward from that point in space and time. Current theories of the early universe suggest instead that space itself expanded, everywhere in the universe at once, and that it is still expanding, pushing those clumps of matter that we call galaxies further and further apart.
Before a crowd of exactly 419 people, Mather spent about an hour reviewing the history of astronomy, telescopes, and satellites before showing some previews of the enormous James Webb space telescope, whose mirror will be about 7 times the area of the Hubble space telescope that has been generating all those internet images of stars and nebulae for the past couple of decades. Among other things the Hubble can’t do, the Webb telescope will be able to take measurements of the atmospheres of planets circling other stars, to look for those unusual gases that on Earth mean life – oxygen and methane, for instance.
During the question / answer session after the talk, a young lady asked a common question that I’m sure NASA insiders hate, something to the effect of:
- Why are you spending all of this money building telescopes and looking for life, instead of spending it down here, on this planet, solving social and environmental problems?
Mather gave possibly the best answer to that question that I’ve ever heard. His response (and again, I’m paraphrasing):
- Building a telescope is easy. Tell me what you want it to do, and I can design it, and we can build it. We can’t even agree on what the social problems are, much less on what solutions to invest in.
The public talks are a valuable form of outreach. For the space enthusiast, however, they start to sound the same after a while. The meat of the conference was the professionals-only session on Saturday. In addition to a more technical talk by Dr. Mather on the James Webb Space Telescope, there were eight talks by astronomers from around the state. The first four were experimental results, which I’ll translate for you from their acronym-laden technical abstracts, which is how the pros talk to each other.
Thomas Boudreaux, an undergraduate at High Point University, described the problem of data overload that comes from having so many telescopes watching the skies all the time. Industry – Google image search, for example – has been using neural networks to classify images for several years now, but astronomers are just now getting into it. The method was both fast and accurate, which means more people will probably start doing it.
Ward Howard, a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill, has been watching a group of 200,000 stars in the southern sky to map out the full distribution of solar flares – how often they happen, how big they are, those kinds of variables. Solar flares can kill living things with radiation if they are intense enough, so this is an important component of the search for life. Fewer flares in a particular system probably means a better chance of finding living things there.
Anatoly Miroshnichenko of UNC-Greensboro worked with ten Russian collaborators to monitor AS 386, a hot blue star about five times the mass of our own sun. Observations indicate that it is surrounded by a dusty disk (possibly early in the planet forming stage), one which does not account for all of the mass in the system. That means there must be an invisible companion of some sort.
Enrique Gomez of Western Carolina University launched a high altitude balloon to pass upwards through the moon’s shadow during this past August’s total solar eclipse (He was out near Cullowhee, so there were no clouds like there were here in Greensboro). Without the sun’s interference, he could get accurate measures of cosmic ray radiation. He also measured how quickly the upper atmosphere cooled during the eclipse.
Work continued through lunch at a meeting of the International Dark Sky Association. Light pollution is a big deal to astronomers, which is one reason they tend to put their telescopes on mountaintops (another is that hey, they get to go to the mountains more often).
The afternoon session was devoted to talks on educational projects for the next generation of astronomers.
Steven Singletary of Robeson Community College has been training high school students to classify their large collection of meteorites.
Don Smith of Guilford College was having his students photograph human-made satellites, as a way of teaching them how to capture good images of fast-moving objects.
Charles Goodman of Pitt Community College has completed construction of two remote-controlled telescopes and a small planetarium, resources he hopes to share with the rest of the educational community.
Finally, Dan Caton of Appalachian State University described the “joys, frustrations, and laments” of operating a telescope on a similar shared system called Skynet (I’m absolutely sure there was a Terminator joke in there somewhere).
Because North Carolina does not have state educational standards for astronomy at the high school level, these kinds of independently organized meetings are especially important for educators. There’s not much way for teachers to do professional development, otherwise, unless they get hooked up with NASA (which does have an extensive website and an ambassador program).
At a national meeting, students are not normally expected to present up on the stage. Instead, they usually prepare a poster of their results and stand next to it to talk to smaller groups who come by. While this particular conference was specially designed to be more inclusive of early-career researchers at the podium, there was also a poster session. Five of the dozen posters at this session were connected in some way or other to the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, a former NSA listening post which now points its radar antennas towards the stars, eavesdropping on the cosmos more than the cosmonauts. They work with students at all levels from elementary school to undergraduate internships. PARI was made possible in part by J. Donald Cline, the Greensboro businessman who also funded the Cline Observatory at GTCC and the planetarium at Guilford College. Three of those posters were detailed meteorite classifications from the RCC program described earlier – two chondrites (rocks from the beginnings of the solar system, which usually have a low metal content) and one that had apparently been blasted out of the crust of Mars by an impact before landing here on Earth. Just think for a second about the opportunity to work on something like that for a jaded high school student. I mean, telescopes are cool, but a meteorite you can touch.
![[image link]](https://observatory.gtcc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2017/11/Two-Views-of-Cline-Obsy-at-GTCC.png){kind=link}
This October the Cline Observatory celebrated its 20th year of operation. In that time nearly 28,000 people have attended its free Friday night viewings. It remains the only place in the state where the public can use a 24-inch reflecting telescope for free. Weather permitting, that is. For updates regarding how weather or other issues will affect this week’s session, check Twitter @gtccastro.
Thanks to Tom English for organizing the conference, providing the abstracts, and for fact-checking a draft of the article.
This creator-owned piece was submitted in October to a new local zine called Constellations. No word yet on when the first issue will be out, but when it is, I will link to it from here.
REFERENCES
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2006/
https://jwst.nasa.gov/comparison_about.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-type_main-sequence_star
Unfortunately, light pollution also tends to disrupt the night-time migrations of millions of birds, who use the stars to navigate. This is why you may find them dead at the base of buildings during this time of year. They get drawn in by the lights and crash into windows.
The number of the day is 419 :) Thanks for an interesting read!
You're welcome.
"Current theories of the early universe suggest instead that space itself expanded, everywhere in the universe at once, and that it is still expanding, pushing those clumps of matter that we call galaxies further and further apart."
Richard Muller wrote a recent book about a similar view that the universe is also constantly creating new TIME, which is why time seems to progress in only one direction, or as he puts it, to flow.
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/09/27/495608371/now-and-the-physics-of-time