Department News

Suzanne Hawley, Chair

Suzanne Hawley, chair

it has been an exciting and successful year so far, even as we all struggle through our current financial difficulties. One of the events that we are most excited about is the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) where we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first use of an astronomical telescope by Galileo. The department is planning many activities ranging from planetarium shows to star parties to talks by famous astronomers and astronomy writers. In January, we were honored to start off the year with Dava Sobel who spoke on "Galileo and the International Year of Astronomy" as part of the Danz Lecture program. Dava's talk was to a packed house and she spent many hours afterward talking with students and the public about her life in science journalism and the impact of astronomy on understanding our place in the universe.

In the coming months we will be sponsoring additional presentations and activities including Frank Drake from the SETI institute who will talk about the search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence as part of the Astronomy Open House, and Debra Fischer (a member of the team that has discovered over one-third of planetary systems now known) who will discuss the search for Earth-like planets. These and other events will be open to the public so stay tuned to the IYA2009 calendar on our website. Also, all of these events are made possible by the volunteer efforts of our active and dedicated students, staff and faculty. If you would like to contribute to our outreach or scientific endeavors, you may make a donation here.

On the science front there have been many new developments. The third phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) started on July 15, 2008 at the Apache Point Observatory in southern New Mexico. The UW is one of the founding partners of the SDSS, the largest digital survey of the universe which has been in operation since 2000. This new phase of the SDSS will undertake a diverse range of research programs, from studying the nature of dark energy to mapping the distribution of stars in our galaxy, to looking for a population of planets around nearby stars. It will provide a wealth of information and data for our students, postdocs and faculty to further our understanding of the nature of the universe.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), an 8.4m telescope that will image half of the sky every 3 nights (a thousand-fold increase in the data rate over the SDSS) underwent its first design review last year and passed with flying colors. LSST is expected to begin operations in 2014 and will generate many tens of Terabytes of data every night. The UW is a founding partner of the LSST and many members of the department are already hard at work on the design and development phase of the project, led by Associate Professor Zeljko Ivezic, the LSST Project Scientist. We look forward to using LSST data to study the nature of dark matter and dark energy and to detect asteroids that might potentially impact the Earth. Since the LSST will collect more information in six months than is currently stored in all of the book collections of the Library of Congress, the ability to access and analyze such a large database presents a very significant challenge!

In personnel news, we welcomed five new graduate students and eight new postdocs this year. We also had a large number of faculty promotions: Dr. Vikki Meadows and Dr. Eric Agol were both promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure, Dr. Fabio Governato was promoted to Research Associate Professor, and Dr. Julianne Dalcanton was promoted to Full Professor. Congratulations to all for these significant achievements.