Without stars, we would never have people. — Cara Battersby<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n With interests in the birth and growth of black holes, stars, and galaxies, three astronomers landed at the UConn Department of Physics this fall, and have begun sharing their love of the cosmos through a new program in astronomy and astrophysics.<\/p>\n Trump and fellow assistant professors of physics Cara Battersby and Kate Whitaker are working to offer new astrophysics courses, get students involved in astronomy research, and mentor undergraduate and graduate students.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are really eager to get students built up with a core foundation in astrophysics,\u201d says Whitaker. \u201cI\u2019m excited about building the astronomy program here.\u201d<\/p>\n When black holes burp <\/strong><\/p>\n Despite supermassive black holes\u2019 bad reputation, nearly every galaxy has one in its center, and Trump wants to know more about them.<\/p>\n Using the Hubble Space Telescope<\/a> and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey<\/a>, Trump, who comes to UConn from a Hubble Fellowship<\/a> at Penn State, observes supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, and examines the hole\u2019s edge, or its event horizon.<\/p>\n He watches how the hole can build or tear down its surrounding galaxy through outflows from its active and chaotic area outside the event horizon, called its accretion disk. Matter that doesn\u2019t fall in can get spit forcefully out, propagating through empty space, says Trump.<\/p>\n \u201cIt may do things like sweep up gas, which might have otherwise collapsed down to form new stars,\u201d he says. \u201cSo it may quench star formation.\u201d<\/p>\n On the other hand, elements need to travel through space to start new galaxies, so perhaps black holes could contribute to the formation of new distant galaxies over time, he says.<\/p>\n Galaxies may also control their black holes, by feeding them only occasional tidbits of matter, not letting them \u201cgorge themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s some sort of weird control going on here,\u201d he says, “and we don\u2019t yet understand the physics behind it.”<\/p>\n Red and dead<\/strong><\/p>\n When a galaxy stops forming stars, astronomers call it \u201cred and dead,\u201d for the long-wavelength light it emits. But how galaxies enter this quiescent stage remains a mystery, says Whitaker, currently a Hubble Fellow<\/a> at UMass Amherst.<\/p>\n It could be due to the galaxy\u2019s supermassive black hole, radiating energy and keeping things too hot to form stars. Or the galaxy could have lost most of its gases \u2013 maybe via burps from its black hole \u2013 that are essential to star formation.<\/p>\n Recently, Whitaker has discovered distant, ancient galaxies in the process of shutting down, and she will begin collecting data from one such galaxy in January.<\/p>\n Using space telescopes is like using a time machine, Whitaker says, because much of the light they detect was emitted billions of years ago. The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope<\/a>, set to launch on a rocket in October 2018, will be the most powerful space telescope of its kind, says Whitaker. It will help researchers observe events that occurred closer to the beginning of the universe \u2013 more than 12.7 billion years ago \u2013 than has ever been observed. Astronomers poetically call this era \u201ccosmic dawn.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201c[The] James Webb [Telescope] is so exciting because it will allow us to really look at the first mature galaxies, at the peak epoch of star formation,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The Milky Way experiment<\/strong><\/p>\n Star formation, notes Battersby, is a fundamental physical process that creates many of the elements that make up new stars, planets, and even life itself.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout stars, we would never have people,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Astronomers\u2019 predictions about star formation have turned out to be wrong, which drives one of Battersby\u2019s research directions.<\/p>\n \u201cThe process of forming a star involves collecting a lot of material, and that\u2019s what gravity does, it\u2019s an attractive force,\u201d she says. \u201cWhat opposes that is the internal pressure of the gas, and that depends on the environment. This environmental dependence hasn\u2019t been tested in a lot of detail.\u201d<\/p>\n As a National Science Foundation Fellow<\/a> at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics<\/a>, she is leading the largest survey ever conducted to the center of the Milky Way galaxy, where the gas is much denser, and the pressure and temperature are different, than they would be in our solar neighborhood.<\/p>\n Using data from the Submillimeter Array<\/a> on the summit of the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, her team is looking at long-wavelength light from very cold regions, which has the potential to soon form stars.<\/p>\n \u201cAstronomers don\u2019t have a laboratory where we can create a star in one environment and create a star in another environment, and see what changes,\u201d she explains. \u201cLuckily the universe is a really big place, so any experiment you can think of is probably happening somewhere. You just have to find it.\u201d<\/p>\n ‘Cosmic dawn’ at UConn<\/strong><\/p>\n Even before setting foot on campus this fall, the new faculty began receiving emails from enthusiastic UConn students about classes and research.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth the undergraduate and graduate students are very excited, because they have been requesting such a program at UConn for a long time,\u201d says Nora Berrah, professor and head of the physics department. \u201cThe physics department is elated to have been able to hire these three outstanding astronomers.\u201d<\/p>\n As part of a plan to eventually create an astrophysics major, the new faculty will add an undergraduate Modern Astrophysics sequence for physics majors starting in fall 2017, and will look toward offering upper-level courses, with titles like Stars and Compact Objects, Galaxies and Cosmology, and Radiative Processes.<\/p>\n Battersby is keen to continue her outreach program, called BiteScis<\/a>, pairing physics graduate students with K-12 teachers to bring science lessons into the classroom. With funding from the Templeton Foundation<\/a>, she will create a website of searchable open-access lesson plans for teachers by grade level.<\/p>\n \u201cI want all students to know that science can be an option for them,\u201d says Battersby.<\/p>\n Although not all students of astronomy become astrophysicists, Whitaker says, they learn valuable skills for many career paths involving problem solving, creativity, and the ability to work with large amounts of data.<\/p>\n But the draw for most students \u2013 and for her \u2013 is that astronomy is just plain fun.<\/p>\n \u201cI love astronomy, because you just need a good idea and some imagination,\u201d she says. \u201cIn the words of Carl Sagan: Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" UConn launches its first astrophysics program, with faculty studying stars, galaxies, and why black holes aren’t so bad after all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":118430,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2225,2227],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1860],"class_list":["post-118339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-uconn-storrs","category-uconn-edu-homepage"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-12 21:48:10","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118339"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118450,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118339\/revisions\/118450"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/118430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118339"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=118339"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=118339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/cmz_3color_full_image-e1477064902131.jpg\")
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