Science in the Triangle

First, the good news about SOAR, the high-powered telescope that astrophysicists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill helped build 1995 in the Chilean Andes.

Sheila Kannapan, a UNC physics and astronomy professor, and a few of her students are using SOAR to measure the mass of large objects and star clusters in the universe. Their work is part of a survey that, for the first time, will allow astrophysicists to determine the mass of the universe and better understand dark matter.

During a visit to the UNC campus Thursday, where scientists access the telescope from a remote control room, David Stark and David Hendel, two of Kannapan’s students, explained some of the survey work they do.

Kannapan’s students use a spectrograph, an instrument that measures the light from an object.

Standing in front of a board that showed a drawing of the spectrograph and a measurement chart, Hendel and Stark said the measurements allow assessments about what the light is made of and how far away an object really is.

On a television screen nearby, I and my fellow science writers could watch telescope operators in Chile working their shift and watching us through a Web cam mounted on the screen.

The computer screen below the TV showed a rendering of the Sombrero Galaxy, which is visible through amateur telescopes. Hendel showed us the bright speck on the lower edge of the galaxy that is a new object UNC astrophysicists are studying.

As part of our visit, which was organized by the Triangle-based group of science writers SCONC, we also listened to a presentation by Gerald Cecil, a UNC physics and astronomy professor who teaches students how to build stargazing instruments.

Cecil, who helped design and build SOAR, hopes to this year finish an instrument made with fiberglass cables that would provide a grid of light measurements rather than just a thin slice.

But now the bad news about SOAR, as laid out by Cecil, a wiry, hands-on teacher who’s frustrated by the difficulty of getting funding. (On the bottom of his Web site, Cecil has a running account of the costs of U.S. oil imports and the Iraq war.)

UNC astrophysics, a small department of about half a dozen professors, can get on SOAR 60 nights of the year. That’s fairly unique access to a telescope like SOAR, which is designed to produce the best quality images of any observatory in its class in the world.

To gain this access for 20 years, UNC paid $8 million up front, which did not include ongoing maintenance costs. That’s another $80,000 to $100,000 every year.

Fund-raising efforts have begun to continue the SOAR project, which is also funded by Michigan State University, the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory and Brazil. But money is tight at public universities like UNC and Michigan and federal stimulus money to boost research and development isn’t available for a telescope on top of a Chilean mountain.

Cecil worries that in 2016, when access to SOAR must be renewed, UNC astrophysicists will lose the 60 nights in the sky that now allow them to complete research in a couple of weeks that otherwise would take a year.