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2016 Newsletter 1 BERKELEY ASTRONOMY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY WINTER 2016 Astronomy in the News For full versions of news articles, visit news.berkeley.edu CONTENTS Astromony in the News ...................1 SUPERMASSIVE BLACK LONG-TERM, HI-RES Chair’s Message ................................4 HOLES MAY BE LURKING TRACKING OF ERUPTIONS Getting to know new faculty ..........4 EVERYWHERE IN THE ON JUPITER’S MOON IO Faculty awards and highlights ....... 5 UNIVERSE OCTOBER 20, 2016–Bob Sanders, Media Retirements ........................................6 APRIL 6, 2016–Bob Sanders, Media Relations Relations Leuschner Observatory Update ...7 Evening with the Stars .....................7 A near-record supermassive black hole Jupiter’s moon Io continues to be the most discovered in a sparse area of the local volcanically active body in the solar system, Undergrad Symposium ...................7 universe indicate that these monster as documented by the longest series of Student Prizes and Awards ............8 objects — this one equal to 17 billion frequent, high-resolution observations of Sackler Lecture .................................9 suns — may be more common than the moon’s thermal emission ever obtained. In Memoriam .....................................9 once thought, according to UC Berkeley Using near-infrared adaptive optics on two Astro Nights .......................................9 astronomers. of the world’s largest telescopes — the Upcoming Events ...........................10 Until now, the biggest supermassive black 10-meter Keck II and the 8-meter Gemini Give to Astronomy .........................10 holes — those with masses at or near 10 North, both located near the summit of billion times that of our sun — have been the dormant volcano Maunakea in Hawaii — UC Berkeley astronomers tracked 48 over time, as if one triggered another 500 found at the cores of very large galaxies in kilometers away. regions loaded with other large galaxies. volcanic hot spots on the surface over a The newly discovered black hole is in a period of 29 months from August 2013 “While it stretches the imagination to galaxy, NGC 1600, in the opposite part of through the end of 2015. Without adaptive devise a mechanism that could operate the sky from the Coma Cluster in a relative optics — a technique that removes the over distances of 500 kilometers, Io’s desert, said lead discoverer Chung-Pei atmospheric blur to sharpen the image — volcanism is far more extreme than Ma, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy Io is merely a fuzzy ball. Adaptive optics anything we have on Earth and continues and head of the Massive Survey, a study can separate features just a few hundred to amaze and baffle us,” de Kleer said. kilometers apart on Io’s 3,600-kilometer- of the most massive galaxies in the local De Kleer and de Pater discussed their universe with the goal of understanding diameter surface. observations at a media briefing on Oct. how galaxies form and grow supermassive. “On a given night, we may see half a 20 during a joint meeting of the American While finding a gigantic black hole in a dozen or more different hot spots,” said Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences and the European Continued on page 2 Katherine de Kleer, a UC Berkeley graduate student who led the observations. “Of Io’s Planetary Science Congress in Pasadena, hundreds of active volcanoes, we have been California. Papers describing the able to track the 50 that were the most observations have been powerful over the past few years.” accepted for future publication by She and Imke de Pater, a UC Berkeley the journal professor of astronomy and of earth and Icarus. planetary science, observed the heat coming off of active eruptions as well as cooling lava flows and were able to determine the temperature and total power output of individual volcanic eruptions. They tracked their evolution over days, High-resolution image of Io, weeks and sometimes even years. showing hot spots — Loki Patera Black holes bend light like a lens, distorting and Amaterasu Patera — visible the stars behind them, as portrayed in this Interestingly, some of the eruptions from Earth only with adaptive simulation. The black center represents the appeared to progress across the surface optics on the planet’s largest event horizon of the black hole, from which telescopes, Keck and Gemini. nothing, not even light, can escape. (Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, and D. Coe, J.WINTER Anderson, and 2016 BERKELEYR. van der Marel ASTRONOMY (STScI) ) 2 WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THE LIGHTS CAME ON IN THE UNIVERSE? SEPTEMBER 14, 2016–Bob Sanders, Media Relations An experiment to explore the aftermath universe we see today. expand to 350 telescopes, consists of radio of cosmic dawn, when stars and galaxies “The first galaxies lit up and started dishes staring fixedly upwards, measuring first lit up the universe, has received nearly ionizing bubbles of gas around them, and radiation originally emitted at a wavelength $10 million in funding from the National soon these bubbles started percolating of 21 centimeters – the hyperfine transition Science Foundation to expand its detector and intersecting and making bigger and in the hydrogen atom – that has been red- array in South Africa. bigger bubbles,“ said Aaron Parsons, a UC shifted by a factor of 10 or more since it The experiment, an international col- Berkeley associate professor of astronomy was emitted some 13 billion years ago. The laboration called the Hydrogen Epoch of and principal investigator for HERA. researchers hope to detect the boundaries Reionization Array, or HERA, currently has “Eventually, they all intersected and you between bubbles of ionized hydrogen – 19 14-meter (42-foot) radio dishes aimed got this über bubble, leaving the universe as invisible to HERA – and the surrounding at the southern sky near Carnarvon, South we observe it today: Between galaxies the neutral or atomic hydrogen. Africa, and will soon up that to 37. The $9.5 gas is essentially all ionized.“ By tuning the receiver to different million in new funding will allow the array That’s the theory, anyway. HERA hopes for wavelengths, they can map the bubble to expand to 240 radio dishes by 2018. the first time to observe this key cosmic boundaries at different distances or Led by UC Berkeley, HERA will explore milestone and then map the evolution of redshifts to visualize the evolution of the the billion-year period after hydrogen reionization to about 1 billion years after bubbles over time. gas collapsed into the first stars, perhaps the Big Bang. “HERA can also tell us a lot about how 100 million years after the Big Bang, “We have learned a ton about the galaxies form,” Parsons said. “Galaxies are through the ignition of stars and galaxies cosmology of our universe from studies very complex organisms that feed back of the cosmic microwave on themselves, regulating their own star background, but those formation and the gas that falls into them, experiments are observing and we don’t really understand how they just the thin shell of light that live, especially at this early time when was emitted from a bunch flowing hydrogen gas ends up as complex of protons and electrons that structures with spiral arms and black holes finally combined into neutral in the middle. The epoch of reionization hydrogen 380,000 years after is a bridge between the cosmology that the Big Bang,” he said. “We we can theoretically calculate from first know from these experiments principles and the astrophysics we observe that the universe started today and try to understand.” out neutral, and we know UC Berkeley’s partners in HERA are the that it ended ionized, and we University of Washington, UCLA, Arizona are trying to map out how it State University, the National Radio transitioned between those Astronomical Observatory, the University two.” of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts The HERA array in South Africa consisted of “Before the cosmic dawn, Institute of Technology, Brown University, 19 dishes on March 7, 2016, but continues to the universe glowed from the cosmic the University of Cambridge in the UK, the grow, replacing an earlier experiment called microwave background radiation, but there Square Kilometer Array in South Africa and PAPER (small dishes in the background). weren’t stars lighting up the universe,” the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. (Images courtesy of the HERA team) said David DeBoer, a research astronomer Other collaborators are the Harvard- in UC Berkeley’s Radio Astronomy Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in throughout the universe. These first Laboratory. “At some point the neutral Cambridge, Massachusetts, the University brilliant objects flooded the universe hydrogen seeded the stars and black holes of KwaZulu Natal, the University of with ultraviolet light that split or ionized and galaxies that relit the universe and led Western Cape and Rhodes University, all the hydrogen atoms between galaxies to the epoch of reionization.” all in South Africa, and California State into protons and electrons to create the The HERA array, which could eventually Polytechnic University in Pomona. SUPERMASSIVE, continued from page 1 massive galaxy in a crowded area of the are quite a few galaxy groups the size of Ma and her colleagues will report the universe is to be expected–like running NGC 1600 and its satellites,” Ma said. discovery of the black hole, which is across a skyscraper in Manhattan–it “So the question now is, ‘Is this the tip located about 200 million light-years from seemed less likely they could be found in of an iceberg?’ Maybe there are a lot more Earth in the direction of the constellation the universe’s small towns. monster black holes out there that don’t live Eridanus, in the April 6 issue of the “Rich groups of galaxies like the Coma in a skyscraper in Manhattan, but in a tall journal Nature.
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