CU News
News from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
CU study: ‘Sideline quasars’ helped to stifle early galaxy formation
Mar 21st
CU-Boulder Professor Michael Shull and Research Associate David Syphers used the Hubble Space Telescope to look at the quasar — the brilliant core of an active galaxy that acted as a “lighthouse” for the observations — to better understand the conditions of the early universe. The scientists studied gaseous material between the telescope and the quasar with a $70 million ultraviolet spectrograph on Hubble designed by a team from CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy.
During a time known as the “helium reionization era” some 11 billion years ago, blasts of ionizing radiation from black holes believed to be seated in the cores of quasars stripped electrons from primeval helium atoms, said Shull. The initial ionization that charged up the helium gas in the universe is thought to have occurred sometime shortly after the Big Bang.
“We think ‘sideline quasars’ located out of the telescope’s view reionized intergalactic helium gas from different directions, preventing it from gravitationally collapsing and forming new generations of stars,” he said. Shull likened the early universe to a hunk of Swiss cheese, where quasars cleared out zones of neutral helium gas in the intergalactic medium that were then “pierced” by UV observations from the space telescope.
The results of the new study also indicate the helium reionization era of the universe appears to have occurred later than thought, said Shull, a professor in CU-Boulder’s astrophysical and planetary sciences department. “We initially thought the helium reionization era took place about 12 billion years ago,” said Shull. “But now we think it more likely occurred in the 11 to 10 billion-year range, which was a surprise.”
A paper on the subject by Shull and Syphers was published online this week in the Astrophysical Journal.
The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph used for the quasar observations aboard Hubble was designed to probe the evolution of galaxies, stars and intergalactic matter. The COS team is led by CU Professor James Green of CASA and was installed on Hubble by astronauts during its final servicing mission in 2009. COS was built in an industrial partnership between CU and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder.
“While there are likely hundreds of millions of quasars in the universe, there are only a handful you can use for a study like this,” said Shull. Quasars are nuclei in the center of active galaxies that have “gone haywire” because of supermassive black holes that gorged themselves in the cores, he said. “For our purposes, they are just a really bright background light that allows us to see to the edge of the universe, like a headlight shining through fog.”
The universe is thought to have begun with the Big Bang that triggered a fireball of searing plasma that expanded and then become cool neutral gas at about 380,000 years, bringing on the “dark ages” when there was no light from stars or galaxies, said Shull. The dark ages were followed by a period of hydrogen reionization, then the formation of the first galaxies beginning about 13.5 billion years ago. The first galaxies era was followed by the rise of quasars some 2 billion years later, which led to the helium reionization era, he said.
The radiation from the huge quasars heated the gas to 20,000 to 40,000 degrees Fahrenheit in intergalactic realms of the early universe, said Shull. “It is important to understand that if the helium gas is heated during the epoch of galaxy formation, it makes it harder for proto-galaxies to hang on to the bulk of their gas. In a sense, it’s like intergalactic global warming.”
The team is using COS to probe the “fossil record” of gases in the universe, including a structure known as the “cosmic web” believed to be made of long, narrow filaments of galaxies and intergalactic gas separated by enormous voids. Scientists theorize that a single cosmic web filament may stretch for hundreds of millions of light years, an eye-popping number considering that a single light-year is about 5.9 trillion miles.
COS breaks light into its individual components — similar to the way raindrops break sunlight into the colors of the rainbow — and reveals information about the temperature, density, velocity, distance and chemical composition of galaxies, stars and gas clouds.
For the study, Shull and Syphers used 4.5 hours of data from Hubble observations of the quasar, which has a catalog name of HS1700+6416. While some astronomers define quasars as feeding black holes, “We don’t know if these objects feed once, or feed several times,” Shull said. They are thought to survive only a few million years or perhaps a few hundred million years, a brief blink in time compared to the age of the universe, he said.
“Our own Milky Way has a dormant black hole in its center,” said Shull. “Who knows? Maybe our Milky Way used to be a quasar.”
The first quasar, short for “quasi-stellar radio source,” was discovered 50 years ago this month by Caltech astronomer Maarten Schmidt. The quasar he observed, 3C-273, is located roughly 2 billion years from Earth and is 40 times more luminous than an entire galaxy of 100 billion stars. That quasar is receding from Earth at 15 percent of the speed of light, with related winds blowing millions of miles per hour, said Shull.
-CU-
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Lyndi McCartney, wife of former CU coach Bill McCartney, dies of emphysema
Mar 21st
WESTMINSTER – Lyndi McCartney, the wife of former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, passed away Thursday afternoon after a lengthy, hard-fought battle with emphysema. She was 70.
“We have four children and 10 grandchildren and we all loved her very much,” Bill McCartney said of his wife for a half century; the two celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last Dec. 29.
Lyndi spent her last days in Hospice care and was surrounded by family when she finally succumbed after decade-plus long battle against the disease. Grandsons, the sons of daughter Kristy, T.C., a CU graduate assistant coach, and Derek, a freshman on the football team, were among those present when she passed.
The eldest McCartney son, Mike, announced his mother’s passing on his Facebook page with simply, “RIP Mom. I am who I am because of you. Love you.” He works as a player’s representative with Priority Sports out of Chicago.
The youngest son, Marc, posted this on Facebook: “Today I mourn, but my mom suffers no more. She is forever in heaven now and that gives me a great peace that surpasses all understanding. Thank you to all of the people who loved my mom and have been praying for her. Your thoughts and prayers have been a great encouragement and comfort to me and my family.” Marc is the vice president for special events with RightNow, a non-profit ministry in Rockwall, Texas
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The couples’ other son, Tom, is the football coach at Fairview High School in Boulder.
Services are pending.
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CU gets a real conservative professor for a year
Mar 13th
“Dr. Hayward brings an impressive breadth of knowledge to this position, having researched a range of environmental, historical and political issues,” said Steven R. Leigh, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at CU-Boulder.
Hayward’s recent investigations of environmental issues “bring important dimensions to discussions on campus.” Leigh said. “He also shows dedication to our teaching mission, planning a well-defined range of courses. We are pleased that he will join us as a visiting scholar.”
Hayward is tentatively scheduled to teach four undergraduate courses, three in political science — Constitutional Law 1 and 2 plus a course in American Political Thought — and one in environmental studies, Free-Market Environmentalism.
Hayward will teach in both fall and spring semesters in 2013-14. Additionally, he will be encouraged to foster discussion by hosting public events in the campus community and perhaps around the state.
“This is a bold experiment for the university and me to see whether the ideological spectrum can be broadened in a serious and constructive way,” Hayward said.
Hayward added that the college classroom should not be a forum for ideological advocacy.
“Good teaching should make all students, of whatever disposition, better thinkers,” he said. “In the humanities, this should be done by considering fairly the full range of perspectives on a subject. That’s the way I intend to conduct classes while I am visiting at the university, and I hope that students of every kind of opinion will feel welcome in my classroom.”
Hayward holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Claremont Graduate School. He has been the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he was principal author and project director of the AEI’s “Energy and Environment Outlook.”
Hayward has been a visiting lecturer in the Government Department of Georgetown University and is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. He has also served as a Bradley Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Hayward’s essays have been published in The Washington Post, National Review, Weekly Standard and other publications. His most recent book, published in 2010, is “Mere Environmentalism: A Biblical Perspective on Humans and the Natural World.”
Since last summer, an advisory committee has been working to identify candidates for the visiting scholar position. The committee sought a “highly visible” scholar who is “deeply engaged in either the analytical scholarship or practice of conservative thinking and policymaking or both.”
The advisory committee that selected Hayward includes five faculty members and five community members. Keith Maskus, associate dean of social sciences and professor of economics, chairs the committee but does not vote.
Maskus said committee members worked together extremely well and were committed to the goal of bringing an exceptional scholar to campus.
Non-university committee members include David Pyle, founder and CEO of American Career College; Mike Rosen, long-time radio host on AM 850 KOA and Denver Post columnist and political commentator; Bob Greenlee, former Boulder mayor and City Council member, and current president of Centennial Investment & Management Company Inc.; CU President Emeritus Hank Brown; and Earl Wright, CEO of AMG National Trust Bank.
CU faculty members on the committee include Vanessa Baird, associate professor of political science; David S. Brown, professor and chair of political science; Bradley Monton, associate professor of philosophy; Murat Iyigun, professor of economics; and Susan K. Kent, professor and chair of history.
“I am delighted to welcome Steven Hayward to the faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder as our inaugural Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy,” said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. “His record of scholarship, commentary and publishing on subjects ranging from energy to the environment to the U.S. Constitution will spark further debate, discourse and critical thinking among our students and contribute to the diversity of our academic community.”
The Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy is a three-year pilot program supported by private funds. More than 20 donors have raised $1 million to support the program.
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