News from around the BoV
and the Texas Astronomy Program for November 2012
• John Wildenthal Honored in Houston November 10: The late John Wildenthal was honored by his former colleagues from the Houston Municipal Courts on Saturday, November 10.
Judge Wildenthal was a pillar of the Board of Visitors from 1978 until his death in 2010, serving on the Executive Committee and chairing the Bylaws Committee. He was a passionate advocate for the Texas Astronomy program.
Carolyn Wildenthal with the portrait honoring the late Judge John Wildenthal
During a ceremony led by Municipal Courts Director and Presiding Judge Barbara E. Hartle, a portrait of Judge Wildenthal was unveiled, one of seven honoring current and former long-serving judges. All the portraits will hang in the city’s Herbert W. Gee Municipal Courts Building.
Mrs. Carolyn Wildenthal hosted a luncheon for an estimated 75 of her family members and friends prior to the ceremony. Originally scheduled to take place in one of the Herbert W. Gee Building’s courtrooms, the ceremony attracted several hundred attendees, so it was held instead in the gymnasium of the Houston Police Department building next door.
• Making international news, Hobby-Eberly Telescope Massive Galaxy Survey finds most-massive ever black hole (in a surprisingly small galaxy): In a paper published in the journal Nature on November 29, lead author Remco Van Den Bosch (until recently the W.J. McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow at the The University of Texas at Austin) and other team members, including Herman and Joan Suit Professor of Astrophysics Dr. Karl Gebhardt, announce that they have used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope to discover the most massive black hole yet found — and that it lies in NGC 1277, a galaxy that should be too small to host such a massive object.
Hubble image of NGG 127
The discovery comes out of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Massive Galaxy Survey (MGS), which to date has provided data on 700 of a planned 800 galaxies, with the goal of better understanding how black holes and galaxies form and grow together, a process that isn't well understood.
"At the moment there are three completely different mechanisms that all claim to explain the link between black hole mass and host galaxies' properties. We do not understand yet which of these theories is best," said van den Bosch.
"This is a really oddball galaxy," said Gebhardt. "It's almost all black hole."
Damond Benningfield/Karl Gebhardt/StarDate
Ken Crosswell, writing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's ScienceNow site, says: "Imagine if the tallest skyscraper in Kalamazoo, Michigan, towered over any in New York City. That's akin to the puzzle confronting astronomers who have spotted one of the largest black holes ever found—anchoring a galaxy smaller than our Milky Way.... Most large galaxies harbor giant black holes at their centers. The Milky Way's central black hole, for example, weighs 4 million times as much as the sun. But such black holes usually obey a standard correlation: The heavier the galaxy's central bulge of stars, the heavier the black hole. In particular, the mass of a galaxy's bulge is about a thousand times that of its black hole. But it seems that NGC 1277, a compact galaxy 230 million light-years away, never got the memo."
... More at:
Texas
Astronomers Measure Most Massive, Most Unusual Black Hole Using
Hobby-Eberly Telescope
... and at:
Gargantuan Black Hole Occupies Modest Galaxy
... and van den Bosch has a great movie illustration of stars orbiting the black hole at his web site:
Dr. Remco van den Bosch: Max Planck Institut für Astronomie, Heidelberg
• Please mark your calendar for these upcoming BoV meeting dates:
2013
February 8-9
July 26-27
2014
February 21-22
• Dr. John Kormendy named to prestigious post at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics: In June, Dr. John Kormendy, holder of the Curtis T. Vaughan, Jr., Centennial Chair in Astronomy, was named the External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE).
Dr. John Kormendy
Writing to inform Astronomy Department Chair Dr. Dan Jaffe of this honor, MPE’s Managing Director, Dr. Ralf Bender noted that Kormendy is the seventh External Member of MPE, and he listed the previous appointees: Ewine van Dishoeck (Member of the U.S. Academy of Sciences; winner of Spinoza Prize, 2000), Vladimir Fortov (winner of the Max Planck Award for Physics, 1999), Roald Sagdeev (Member of the Russian Academy of Science; winner of the Lenin Prize 1984), Maarten Schmidt (winner of the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, 1978; of the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1980; and of the Kavli Prize, 2008), Yasuo Tanaka (Member of the U.S. Academy of Sciences, winner of the Rossi Prize, 2001) and Charles Townes (Member of the U.S. Academy of Sciences, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1964; winner of the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, 1998).
“The directors of MPE look forward to a continuing evermore fruitful collaboration between the Astronomy Department of the University of Texas and the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics,” Bender concluded.
Photograph by Bill Dingus
• Bill Dingus Photographs "Ring of Fire" near Midland: One of the astronomical highlights of 2012 in the western U.S. was a spectacular Solar eclipse on May 20.
As the StarDate Radio program for May 20, entitled “Ring of Fire” described the event:
The Sun and Moon will team up to produce a brilliant ring of fire across the western United States on the afternoon of May 20, known as an annular solar eclipse.
The eclipse occurs because the Moon will pass directly between Earth and Sun, covering the Sun's disk. The Moon will be near its farthest point from Earth, however, so it won't be quite big enough to cover the entire disk. Instead, a thin ring of sunlight will encircle the Moon.
The annular eclipse will be visible across a narrow strip of Earth's surface that begins in China, wraps across the Pacific Ocean, and ends in the western United States. From the U.S., the path of the eclipse begins at the California-Oregon border around 6:24 p.m. PDT. It then sweeps to the east-southeast, ending over western Texas, as the Sun and Moon set, at 8:39 p.m. CDT. Along the centerline of the eclipse's path, "annularity" will last up to about five minutes.
Along this path, the sky will grow dusky, the air will cool noticeably, and leafy trees will cast odd ring-shaped shadows.
Most of the rest of the United States will see a partial eclipse, in which the Moon will cover a fraction of the Sun but will not be completely enfolded within the Sun's disk. Only the Eastern Seaboard will completely miss the shadow play.
McDonald Observatory and most of Texas’s population centers were outside the annularity zone. Luckily, BoV member Bill Dingus of Midland caught the annular eclipse right at sunset in an oilfield northwest of town, at just the perfect moment for a break in the clouds.
• New Perot Museum "Career Inspiration Stories" feature astronomers Jogee, Shetrone: The new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas will open Saturday, December 1. Opening weekend kicks off at 9:30 a.m. with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, followed by extended hours from 10 a.m. to midnight that day, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, December 2.
Dr. Shardha Jogee
The spectacular museum's five floors house 11 permanent exhibit halls. The exhibits feature 23 "Career Inspiration Stories" (CIS) videos designed to educate young children and inspire them to go into the sciences.
Dr. Matthew Shetrone
The Expanding Universe Hall, which focuses on astronomy and cosmology, will include CIS videos from University of Texas at Austin Associate Professor of Astronomy Shardha Jogee and McDonald Observatory Senior Research Scientist Matthew Shetrone.
Designed by 2005 Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis Architects, the Dallas museum has been named in honor of Margot and Ross Perot, the result of a $50-million gift made by their adult children – Ross Perot, Jr.; Nancy Perot Mulford; Suzanne Perot McGee; Carolyn Perot Rathjen; and Katherine Perot Reeves. The $185-million fundraising goal – which provided for the site acquisition, exhibition planning and design, construction of the new building, education programs and an endowment – was achieved November 2011, more than a year before the Museum’s scheduled opening. The Museum, which was built without incurring any debt or public funding, is located on a 4.7-acre site at 2201 N. Field St., just north of downtown Dallas in Victory Park.
McDonald Observatory's Education and Outreach Office is developing ongoing collaborative efforts with the Perot Museum's education staff, including star parties in Dallas with connections to McDonald Observatory, school and public programs featuring University of Texas at Austin researchers, and professional-development opportunities for museum staff and Dallas teachers. You can find more about the collaboration at:
McDonald
Observatory works with new Perot Museum in Dallas
• Bash Symposium 2011 publication is available free online: The postdoctoral fellows who have edited “Proceedings for the Frank N. Bash Symposium 2011: New Horizons in Astronomy” announce that the publication is available online. Drs. Sarah Salviander, Joel Green, and Andreas Pawlik write, “This year, we elected to publish the proceedings entirely online, so that they would be freely available in a convenient format.”
The BashFest Proceedings are available on the Proceedings of Science website:
BashFest
2011 Proceedings (HTML)
Alternatively, a large PDF of the entire Proceedings is available on the Astronomy Department website:
BashFest 2011
Proceedings (PDF)
• Sally Dodson-Robinson and TACC Create 2-D and 3-D Simulations of Planet Formation (with some surprise results): Dr. Sarah (Sally) Dodson-Robinson, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at The University of Texas at Austin, is featured in a new YouTube video from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
She and her team of researchers are using the TACC’s world-class computing facilities, including the Ranger supercomputer, to model the effects on planet formation of different levels of turbulence, temperature, and other factors over millions of years in the proto-stellar disks around young stars.
“We want to know what conditions are good or bad for forming planets, so getting really good detailed models of how these disks work is important,” Dodson-Robinson says.
Dr. Sally Dodson-Robinson
Too much turbulence keeps small particles from sticking together to eventually form planets, and temperature determines the location of a disk’s “ice line,” the region beyond which ice forms, which is hypothesized as important to the formation of giant planets.
In a discovery with implications for future theories about planet formation, the TACC’s two dimensional modeling showed that, contrary to expectations, the ice line moves out from the center as a disk expands. Dodson-Robinson and her team worked with Dr. Greg Abram of TACC to make three-dimensional models showing the effects of changes to different parameters, to see “what this disk would actually look like if your were to fly over it,” Dodson-Robinson says. You can see those simulations at:
Birth of a Planet (on
Youtube)
• More HET in the news: A team led by Dr. Alex Alex Wolszczan, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, and including colleagues from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, and Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain, announced in July that they had used the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory to identify a 1.5-solar-mass red-giant star, about 2,400 light years away in the constellation Perseus, that has devoured one of its planets.
In an interesting example of the importance of the high-resolution spectroscopy that the HET can produce, the team reported that the star, known as BD+48 740, had abnormally high levels of lithium for a red giant. “In the case of BD+48 740, it is probable that the lithium production was triggered by a mass the size of a planet that spiraled into the star and heated it up while the star was digesting it,” Wolszczan told the Space.com Web site.
HET’s High Resolution Spectroscope identified the signature of lithium that the researchers reported. It also showed a significant second data point -- that BD+48 740 was wobbling due to the presence of a remaining planet. The spectra established both the mass of the plant (about 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter) and the shape of its orbit (extremely elliptical).
“Such orbits are uncommon in planetary systems around evolved stars and, in fact, the BD+48 740 planet’s orbit is the most elliptical one detected so far,” said team member Andrzej Niedzielski of Nicolaus Copernicus University. The researchers theorize that the unusual orbit likely resulted from the destruction of a very large planetary companion, and say that this strengthens the conclusion suggested by the star’s overabundance of lithium.
Thanks to BoV member Bill Pellerin of Houston for the tip. More on this discovery can be found at MSNBC.com:
Giant dying star caught devouring alien planet
... and at Astrophysical Journal Letters:
The Astrophysical Journal Letters
• Joe Mike Pasqua named UT System’s Police Officer of the Month: Joseph Michael (Joe Mike) Pasqua, McDonald Observatory’s Safety Coordinator and the Operations Chief of the Observatory’s Emergency Response Team, was named the UT System Police Featured Officer of the Month in August.
Joe Mike Pasqua
Officer Pasqua, who joined the McDonald Observatory staff in 2006, has worked in a wide variety of public-safety positions since 1990, including patrol officer, Drug Abuse Resistance Education Instructor, line supervisor, and Certified Juvenile and Adult Community Supervision Officer. He and his then-partner, Donald Stockburger, were shot in the line of duty in 1990 in Fort Stockton; although Pasqua survived, Stockburger later died of complications from his wounds.
Pasqua played a key role in establishing the Big Bend Area Law Enforcement Fallen Officer’s Memorial at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, which was dedicated in 2008. At McDonald Observatory, Officer Pasqua serves as a first responder to all emergency situations not only as a law enforcement officer, but as volunteer firefighter and a wild land arson investigator. The UT System press release notes that he volunteered as a first responder for 72 hours nonstop at the beginning of the Rock House fire in 2011. You can find more at:
UT System Officer
of the Month
• Adam Riess honored by Phi Delta Theta Fraternity (including BoV members): BoV Associate member Chris Job of Houston, who is a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, sends word that astronomer Adam Riess (one of the winners of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics, in recognition of his leadership of one of teams that discovered dark energy in 1997, and a member of Phi Delta Theta) was honored at a fraternity dinner at Johns Hopkins University in September. Former BoV Associate Member W.L. Gray of Houston helped host the dinner. More at:
Phi Delta Theta
Hosts Dinner for Nobel Prize-Winning Phi, Adam Riess
• BoV member's company makes a 3D hologram for the Giant Magellan Telescope: BoV Associate Member Mark Holzbach, of Austin and Madison, Wisconsin, announces that his company, Zebra Imaging, is making 3D holographic prints for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT).
Writes Holzbach: "The Giant Magellan Telescope will be one of the next class of super giant earth-based telescopes that promises to revolutionize our view and understanding of the universe. It will be operational in about 10 years and will be located in Chile. Our client wanted to share this amazing new creation in the best way possible."
CAD drawing courtesy of the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization
"Our client chose to use Zebra Imaging's ZScape® 3D Holographic Prints to convey the sheer size and dimensions of the telescope. Our ZScape prints convey a 3D, 360 degree, multi-view of the telescope. The hologram is being used to demonstrate the finished design in its 3D nature for presentations to various stakeholders."
You can find more at:
• Texas State and National Parks See Dark Skies as a Way to Draw Visitors: Parks officials in the State of Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife have begun emphasizing the opportunity to enjoy dark skies to draw visitors, and cities in the Texas Hill Country have enacted lighting ordinances to help build tourism. These and other positive developments on the dark-skies front are detailed in a Texas Tribune story by Kate Galbraith, published October 25, 2012.
Bill Wren with the Frank N. Bash Visitors Center's Wren-Marcario Telescope
Galbraith quotes McDonald Observatory's Bill Wren, who works with governments, civic groups, land owners, and others on cost-efficient light that preserves dark skies, as saying: "The areas where you can actually go to see a dark sky are shrinking, and there are parks in the middle of a lot of them."
Galbraith also notes the recognition of Big Bend National Park as a "dark sky park" by the International Dark-Sky Association — one of only 10 in the world. More at:
Texas Parks, Towns Embrace Dark Sky Movement
• Just for fun: Map of Nearby Stars: Courtesy of Esther Zuckerman of The Atlantic Wire, here is a link to an interactive map of 100,000 nearby stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, with detailed information about 87 of them, created by engineers at Google Chrome, mostly with information from Wikipedia. Note: the interactive map won’t run properly on some browsers (for example, Safari on a Mac), but will work in Chrome or Firefox. Be sure to click on the “Toggle Spectral Index” and “Take a tour” buttons in the top left corner. More at:
Prepare to Be Hypnotized by This Star
Map
• Just for fun: Astrophysicist’s alphabet on the web: The theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, who writes the blog called “Starts with a Bang,” posts an illustrated astronomical alphabet at: More at:
Astrophysicist’s Alphabet (Starts with a
Bang)
[Joel Barna]
BoV Chair's Message: Honoring David Lambert for a Decade of Leadership
Director's Report: HETDEX's Unique Texan View on Dark Energy
News from around the BoV and Texas Astronomy
Department Chair's Message: Recruiting the Best
"The Texas Book Two" Features Essay by Frank Bash
Join Us for the February 2013 BoV meeting
Giant Magellan Telescope Celebration in Washington
Thanks to All BoV Liquor Fund contributors
Please help Executive Committee with Thoughts about Membership Levels
LCOGTN one-meter telescope dedicated, running automated observations