{"id":20594,"date":"2017-07-24T16:02:14","date_gmt":"2017-07-24T20:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=20594"},"modified":"2024-07-02T16:36:34","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T16:36:34","slug":"eyes-in-the-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=20594","title":{"rendered":"Eyes in the Sky"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina has proudly proclaimed to be \u201cfirst in flight.\u201d Less well-known is Carolina\u2019s connection to deep space \u2014 from the first astronomical observatory on a college campus, to the first planetarium in the South, to one of the first administrators at NASA, UNC scientists have long been connected to and inspired by the night sky.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
Captain James Lovell, a NASA astronaut who was navigator on the Apollo 8 mission and commander of Apollo 13, trained at Morehead Planetarium and Science center in the mid-1960s. (photo courtesy of UNC-Chapel Hill)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the fall of 2018, when the James Webb Space Telescope<\/a> launches to an orbit four times farther away than the Moon, it will have an unprecedented ability to see distant events and objects in the universe. Six times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope<\/a>, Webb will be able to detect remnants of the earliest stars and galaxies, and answer fundamental questions about how our world formed.<\/p>\n

The namesake for the most powerful telescope ever developed, James Webb graduated from UNC in 1928 and went on to become the second administrator at NASA. He served from the beginning of the Kennedy administration through the end of the Johnson administration, overseeing all the critical first manned launches until just before the first astronaut-led Apollo flight.<\/p>\n

But Webb is not the only Tar Heel connected to NASA or deep space exploration. Since the university opened its doors, Carolina scientists have been posing questions \u2014 and finding answers \u2014 in the stars.<\/p>\n

The first astronomical observatory<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the early 19th<\/sup> century, back when Franklin Street was a dirt road, and UNC\u2019s enrollment totaled just a few dozen students \u2014 a man ahead of his time helped shape the culture of learning here. Joseph Caldwell, the university\u2019s first president, was a mathematician and Presbyterian minister, and he was also an astronomy buff who saw great physical and philosophical value in looking toward the sky. When he asked for university funds to purchase astronomical tools, though, his requests fell on deaf ears.<\/p>\n

Undeterred, Caldwell used his own money to travel to Europe and came back with several thousand dollars\u2019 worth of scientific materials for the university, including a handful of telescopes. In 1830, he constructed an observatory in the backyard of his house \u2014 the first one in the United States intended solely for educational purposes.<\/p>\n

Despite this promising foundation, it would be another 150 years before the study of astronomy became an official major at UNC. Chris Clemens, senior associate dean for natural sciences in the College of Arts & Sciences, attributes that to the deadliest conflict in our nation\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Civil War ended the astronomical aspirations of many southern universities \u2014 in particular the University of Mississippi,\u201d he says. \u201cThey had ordered the biggest refracting telescope lens ever made, and then the war broke out and they couldn\u2019t complete the project. That telescope went to Wisconsin instead. Because of the war, astronomy in the South didn\u2019t take off until generations later.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first planetarium on a university campus \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The original telescopes that Caldwell purchased from France in 1824 are still on campus today \u2014 on display at UNC\u2019s Morehead Planetarium and Science Center<\/a>. Roughly 100 years after Caldwell built his observatory, John Motley Morehead, III met with UNC\u2019s then-president Frank Porter Graham. The two men chatted about Morehead\u2019s illustrious career in chemistry. Shortly after graduating from UNC, he helped uncover an economical process for manufacturing calcium\u00a0carbide<\/a> \u2014 a discovery that made him very wealthy. Morehead attributed his success to UNC, and wanted to find a way to give back to his alma mater.<\/p>\n

In addition to endowing the John Motley Morehead Foundation<\/a> to provide financial assistance to UNC students, Morehead wanted to inspire young North Carolinians to explore the world of science. He and Graham discussed different possibilities, and ultimately decided on a planetarium.<\/p>\n

When it first opened in 1949, Morehead Planetarium was unprecedented. It was only the sixth planetarium to be built in the United States, the first one in the South, and the first one on a university campus.<\/p>\n

The planetarium not only fulfilled Morehead\u2019s wish of inspiring young people to engage with science \u2014 it also served as a training center for professional space explorers. From 1960 to 1975, over 60 NASA astronauts including Neil Armstrong and John Glenn came to Morehead Planetarium to study celestial navigation \u2014 a critical skill in the event that automatic navigation systems failed while they were in space.<\/p>\n

The training saved lives on three occasions \u2014 during the Mercury Atlas 9 mission, Apollo 12, and Apollo 13, according to Todd Boyette<\/a>, the current director of Morehead Planetarium.<\/p>\n

To this day, it remains the only planetarium in the world to train astronauts in celestial navigation.<\/p>\n

The first astronomers at UNC \u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

As NASA astronauts were honing their skills at Morehead Planetarium, and the country became more engaged with the international space race, UNC\u2019s Department of Physics started recruiting new faculty like Morris Davis, who arrived from Yale in the early 1970\u2019s to become Carolina\u2019s first official astronomer. Wayne Christiansen and Bruce Carney joined the faculty just a few years later. They advocated for adding \u201castronomy\u201d to the department\u2019s title, and started an official astronomy major.<\/p>\n

By 1985, the Department of Physics and Astronomy was on the forefront of astronomical study, boasting a brand-new $45,000 \u201csuper-microcomputer\u201d with extensive memory and operations capabilities. The SUN 2-170 system included a 2-MB, 32-bit processing unit, a tape drive, and a 130-MB hard disk \u2014 a fraction of the operating power of a standard smart phone today.<\/p>\n

Radio technology and radio telescopes were also considered cutting-edge in 1985. Christiansen would travel to the middle of the desert, 120 miles southwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to spend time peering through the most sophisticated radio telescope at the time \u2014 the Very Large Array (VLA). With it, he was able to observe quasars \u2014 extremely remote celestial objects \u2014 several billion light years away.<\/p>\n

But getting time on the VLA was a challenge. Christiansen and Carney wanted a telescope that UNC could claim as its own \u2014 a massive undertaking that would come to fruition 20 years later.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The SOAR telescope observatory sits at an altitude of 8,775 feet in the Chilean Andes. SOAR is among the foremost research facilities available to astronomers in the southern hemisphere.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The value of SOAR <\/strong><\/p>\n

In the Andes mountain range of central Chile is a small peak called Cerro Pach\u00f3n. Rising almost 9,000 feet above sea level, the mountain is home to some of the driest conditions \u2014 and clearest air \u2014 on Earth. It is the perfect place to observe the night sky.<\/p>\n

There are only a handful of 4-meter telescopes in the world, and one of them came to be on this mountain in 2004 thanks to a $32 million public-private partnership among the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), the Ministry of Science of Brazil, Michigan State University, and UNC.<\/p>\n

The Southern Astrophysical Research telescope (SOAR)<\/a> boasts first-rate optics but its true innovation lies in its adjustability. Other 4-meter telescopes have equipment that weighs thousands of pounds and can take an entire day to change. The \u201cquick change\u201d instruments on SOAR, though, allow astronomers to measure the mass and temperature of a white dwarf star, or capture two binary stars orbiting each other.<\/p>\n

Roughly 5,000 miles away, new technology and new instrumentation for SOAR is developed in the Goodman Laboratory for Astronomical Instrumentation<\/a> on UNC\u2019s campus, where students have the ability to observe these phenomena in real time.<\/p>\n

The colors of the universe \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

On a sunny afternoon in early February, J.J. Hermes, a Hubble Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, sits in a room with no windows on the ground floor of Chapman Hall. \u201cThis is sort of the front line where the data is coming in \u2014 in real time,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Astronomers from UNC spend roughly 60 nights a year observing from this room, remotely controlling instruments more than 4,500 miles away in Chile. But their astronomical laboratories are truly remote: The nearest stars UNC researchers observe are still several light years away, tens of trillions of miles from Earth.<\/p>\n

SOAR is one of the most efficient telescopes at capturing blue, near-ultraviolet light, which is often produced from very hot stars.<\/p>\n

On this February evening, Hermes and collaborators were using SOAR to measure the mass and temperature of stars at the end of their life cycle, white dwarfs, which have surface temperatures more than twice as hot as the Sun.<\/p>\n

\u201cSOAR is helping us better understand white dwarfs that pulsate,\u201d Hermes says. \u201cJust as earthquakes tell us about what\u2019s happening at the core of our planet, these pulsations cause \u2018starquakes\u2019 that give us access to phenomena at pressures and densities we simply cannot access from Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

The competitive advantage: UNC undergraduates \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

While Chris Clemens and many UNC students study blue light across the universe, other researchers who use SOAR wanted to replace the blue camera with one that would better study cooler, redder objects \u2014 but this would reduce capabilities in the blue and ultraviolet. To compromise, Clemens suggested they add a red camera to the Goodman Spectrograph. The instrument, though, was not designed to host two cameras.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I got a grad student and an undergrad, and I helped them define what they were going to do,\u201d Clemens says. They didn\u2019t need to build a whole new camera from scratch \u2014 they needed to engineer a new optical interchange on the existing instrument that would allow them to permanently attach a second camera without interfering with any of the existing capabilities. The graduate student, Erik Dennihy, supervised the undergraduate, Stephen Fanale, to write the software and conduct finite element engineering analysis.<\/p>\n

\u201cStephen flew through it,\u201d Dennihy says. \u201cHe\u2019s now our primary software engineer and is working on some ambitious projects to eventually allow the cameras to take sets of images on their own.\u201d<\/p>\n

The opportunity to work on SOAR is a big part of the reason Dennihy chose UNC for graduate school. \u201cSOAR is in a bit of a sweet spot when it comes to providing that hands on experience for students,\u201d he says. \u201cIt comes with all the challenges of working within a large, international collaboration, and is still a small enough consortium to allow significant contributions from students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clemens has received some criticism during design reviews with professional astronomers who believe undergraduate students shouldn\u2019t conduct software development. \u201cThey would tell me, \u2018They don\u2019t take it seriously, they\u2019re only here for four years. We\u2019ve never seen undergrads deliver like a professional team,\u2019\u201d Clemens recalls. \u201cAnd I would say, \u2018You don\u2019t know UNC undergrads.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Clemens built the Goodman spectrograph for SOAR in the early 2000s. An undergraduate helped design the entire software control system for the spectrograph. Dan Reichert built the PROMPT network<\/a> \u2014 small telescopes pointing toward explosive events in the sky that are detected by orbiting X-ray and gamma-ray satellites. Nicholas Law built the EVERYSCOPE<\/a> in Chile.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone who has come to our department has built this, or built that. So we hire people now who are known for building interesting stuff.\u201d As senior associate dean of natural sciences, and former chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Clemens hopes to see UNC gain international recognition in the coming years for our astronomy prowess and unique astrophysics.<\/p>\n

\u201cReally good schools are also hubs,\u201d Clemens says. \u201cSo if an astronomer or physicist in England wants to take a sabbatical to the U.S., we want them to come here instead of Princeton or Harvard.\u201d<\/p>\n

That wish could become a reality with the inauguration of a new center devoted to the study of gravity, cosmology, astrophysics, astronomy, nuclear physics, and particle physics. The goal of the Institute for Cosmology, Subatomic Matter and Symmetries (CoSMS)<\/a> is to bring together scientists from different disciplines by creating open and interactive workspaces. \u201cWe have a chance to be the center for fundamental nuclear physics research in RTP with these three major universities,\u201d Clemens says. \u201cThe CoSMS Institute will lay the groundwork, not just for the next 10 years at UNC, but for the next 50 years, the next 100 years.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Chris Clemens is the senior associate dean for natural sciences within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences and the Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wayne Christiansen is an emeritus professor within the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences.<\/em><\/p>\n

Bruce Carney is an emeritus professor with the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences. He is also a former UNC executive vice chancellor and provost.<\/em><\/p>\n

Todd Boyette is the director of the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, as well as president of the Association of Science Museum Directors.<\/em><\/p>\n

J.J. Hermes is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences.<\/em><\/p>\n

By Mary Lide Parker, Endeavors magazine<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina has proudly proclaimed to be \u201cfirst in flight.\u201d Less well-known is Carolina\u2019s connection to deep space \u2014 from the first astronomical observatory on a college campus, to the first planetarium in the South, to one of the first administrators at NASA, UNC scientists have long been connected to and inspired by the night 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