Monthly Archives: May 2008

General

Growing Up in a Science Microcosm

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University of Colorado against the Flatirons

I was born and spent my childhood and early adult life in Boulder, Colorado. For those who haven’t been there or don’t know about Boulder, it’s home to the University of Colorado and a whole slew of science research institutions including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Space Science Institute. Ball Aerospace makes its home in Boulder, along with other space-related outfits.

Both of my degrees are from CU, and as an undergraduate, I worked at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics and hung out at the campus planetarium. In graduate school I worked for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and continued doing a few lectures at Fiske once in a while to keep my finger in the live planetarium show end of things.

It was interesting to grow up in Boulder’s science community, once I got old enough to appreciate it. There were always lectures on campus, covering just about any topic in science you can imagine. I remember going up to CU once to hear a fellow speak about the emergence of life on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago, and it was the first time I ever heard of stromatolites. Another time a group of us went up there to see a physics lecturer and his amazing experiments. Astronomers, geologists, physicists, you name it, they were available to us, and as I grew up, I met some who were the parents of variousradiosond school classmates.

My dad often talked about the science these folks were doing. One time we found a radiosonde from a weather experiment. It had landed in our fields (we had a farm outside Boulder). He called around and found out it belonged to one of the research institutes (probably the predecessor to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Together we took it back to the lab and I remember looking around with awe at the place. Daddy also worked at Ball Aerospace briefly and used to bring home pictures of some of the spacecraft the company was working on.

Like most kids, I went through the whole “I wanna be an astronaut, I wanna be a pilot, I wanna be a … whatever…” thought process. Eventually I ended up deciding I wanted to be an astronaut and writer. Of course, I haven’t gotten to do the astronaut part, although I certainly have met plenty of them and understand what it is they do. My science writing is a direct result of growing up in a place where science research and education is an integral part of the community.

Being an astronaut or a scientist isn’t an idea outside of the realm of possibility in a place like Boulder–not then and certainly not now. It occurs to me that kids growing up in other places where science isn’t such a big part of community life might feel differently, as if science was being done “somewhere else” or was for “other” people.  I’m glad I grew up in Boulder; there are days that I miss it very much. Would I go back?  That’s a question we talk about once in a while.  I don’t know if I can go back “home” or not. But I’m sure as heck glad that I lived there in the first place.  There aren’t too many places where one small town holds so many research groups. Perhaps that’s why I think of it as the center of the cosmos, and I know that for those of us who grew up in Boulder with an interest in science, it definitely took a village to create that interest.

astronomy news, astrophysics, cosmology, cosmos

It’s Matter…

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and It’s Out There

But, how do you find it? That’s the question that confronts astronomers who study the large-scale structure of the universe. There are two types of matter that they can study-ordinary, baryonic matter (protons, neutrons, and the subatomic particles that make up hydrogen, helium, and other elements (which themselves combine to form stars, planets, and galaxies) and then there’s dark matter, which isn’t baryonic. To get at the problem of how much dark matter there is, you have to corral all the baryonic matter. For a long time, astronomers have known that there’s a substantial mass of baryonic matter out there. The problem was to find it. You have to do a cosmic accounting of it. And, it’s not easy. You can’t just look out at the sky and easily spot the protons, neutrons, and other particles. You have to look at what it does to light.

The way to do that is to look at light from distant quasars through a spectrograph, a device that breaks up the light into its component wavelengths. As that light travels through space between the quasars and us, it gets absorbed by baryonic matter. And that leaves little dark lines (called absorption lines) in the spectrum of the quasar’s light. Those lines correspond to various elements that exist in the intergalactic medium.

Mike Shull and Charles Danforth (of the University of Colorado) used the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) to look at quasars and map the distribution of baryonic matter in the local universe (the four billion or so light-years around us). They’ve now mapped enough of that “local” intergalactic medium to be able to say they’ve found about half of the missing baryonic matter there. (Read the details here.)

Shull says they’re finding structure in this matter, which is a big deal. “We think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the backbone of the universe,” he said. “What we are confirming in detail is that intergalactic space, which intuitively might seem to be empty, is in fact the reservoir for most of the normal, baryonic matter in the universe.”

Of course, there are many more quasars to observe, and mapping the entire universe (in all directions) will take more time and a new instrument that is scheduled to go up on HST later this year. Stay tuned!