FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
August 5, 2004
UNC Receives Grants for New Telescopes in Chile;
Remote Access will Benefit State Schools, Students
CHAPEL HILL, NC -- The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has received two National Science Foundation grants totaling $912,000 to build six telescopes in Chile that will study the most distant objects in the universe.
The six Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring and Polarimetry Telescopes, or PROMPT, will be built at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Andes and are designed to study powerful but distant explosions called gamma-ray bursts.
"The newest telescopes in Chile will be a unique addition to our growing battery of telescopes - there is no other system in the world like it," said Dr. Daniel Reichart, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in UNC-Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences and the lead researcher for the NSF-funded project.
In April, UNC-Chapel Hill helped dedicate the Southern Astrophysical Research, or SOAR, telescope, on Cerro Pachon, Chile. The 4.1-meter aperture telescope is funded by a public-private partnership among UNC-Chapel Hill, the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), the Ministry of Science of Brazil and Michigan State University. SOAR is expected to begin routine science operations later this year.
"With PROMPT and our existing telescope in Chile and a soon-to-be dedicated telescope in South Africa, we will have more guaranteed access to the Southern Hemisphere sky than any other U.S. institution," said Reichart.
The new telescopes in Chile also will open fields of study for undergraduate and high school education statewide, thanks to a consortium of 11 N.C. colleges and universities and remote operating technology available online and at UNC-Chapel Hill's Morehead Observatory.
UNC-Chapel Hill is the lead partner in the PROMPT project, with research collaborators at Appalachian State University, Elon University, Fayetteville State University, Guilford Technical Community College, N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Charlotte, UNC-Greensboro, UNC-Pembroke and Western Carolina University, as well as Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.
Each partner will have about 420 hours of annual observing time among the PROMPT telescopes. Students and faculty researchers will be able to observe the Southern Hemisphere skies over Chile using PROMPT through special remote technology. With PROMPT, students and researchers will simply submit observing requests using a Web interface. PROMPT will automatically observe each target, usually within a few days, and then return the collected images to the students for analysis.
When not chasing gamma-ray bursts, PROMPT also will be used by public school students statewide for a wide variety of projects. UNC-Chapel Hill's Morehead Planetarium and Science Center will have about 2,300 hours per year for K-12 education and public outreach.
Funded by a $50,000 NASA grant, the Morehead Center is developing a curriculum for high school science classes that will allow them to submit observing requests to PROMPT using the same Web interface that the college student-researchers will use. This curriculum also will satisfy a new statewide graduation requirement.
"For the state as a whole, the telescopes will be a tremendous resource for undergraduates and high school students," said Reichart. "By putting professional telescopes squarely in the hands of young people, we hope to inspire the next generation of astronomers and scientists."
PROMPT is being built in two phases. Construction for the first phase, which is supported by a
$130,000 pledge from UNC-Chapel Hill's department of physics and astronomy and a $100,000 gift from alumnus Leonard Goodman of New York City, is scheduled to begin this month. Some of the instrumentation for the telescopes is being built in the Goodman Laboratory for Astronomical Instrumentation on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, before being shipped to Chile.
In September, 15 UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduate students will travel to the PROMPT and SOAR sites in Chile with astronomers Drs. Gerald Cecil and Wayne Christiansen and graduate student Jane Moran. The group will assemble PROMPT as part of a semester-long Burch Field Research Seminar study-abroad program. Students also will conduct research using the SOAR telescope. The Burch program is funded by a gift from alumnus Lucius E. Burch III.
The first phase is scheduled for completion this year, and the second phase, which supports a major equipment upgrade, is scheduled for completion in mid-2005.
Once completed, PROMPT will be monitored every night by graduate and undergraduate students working at UNC-Chapel Hill's new Henry Cox Remote Observing Center, located in Morehead Observatory. The center is made possible by a gift from alumnus Henry Cox of Seminole, Fla.
Astronomers only recently have learned that gamma-ray bursts result when stars more than 30 times as massive as the sun reach the end of their lives and collapse to form black holes, said Reichart.
Since gamma rays do not penetrate Earth's atmosphere, PROMPT will be fed targets from spacecraft that have been designed to find gamma-ray bursts. The most powerful satellite will be NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission, which is due to be launched later this year. Swift is expected to discover one gamma-ray burst every few days and to transmit coordinates to computers on the ground within tens of seconds of each explosion.
PROMPT then will observe these gamma-ray bursts at visible and infrared wavelengths,
and will do so within mere seconds of spacecraft notification, when they are still expected to be very bright, even if at great distances, said Reichart.
Since humans cannot react on so rapid a timescale, PROMPT will be entirely controlled by computers.
Each PROMPT telescope will have a unique capability, said Reichart, such as observation of violet light, blue light, red light and very red light. One will observe infrared light, which the human eye cannot see, and another will measure the polarization, or orientation, of incoming light waves, which should yield valuable information about the role of magnetic fields in the creation of gamma-ray bursts.
As much as 10 percent of Swift's gamma-ray bursts is expected to be more distant than the most distant object yet identified in the universe, said Reichart. PROMPT's ability to observe gamma-ray bursts simultaneously in multiple colors, and to do so quickly before they fade away, will allow it to promptly pick out record breakers, he said.
Since light travels at a finite speed, the most distant gamma-ray bursts are thought to have emitted their light when the universe was only 1 percent of its current age. "In this way, PROMPT will use gamma-ray bursts to probe the early universe," Reichart said.
When a record-breaking gamma-ray burst is identified, the six 0.4-meter diameter PROMPT telescopes will also relay this data to the much larger SOAR telescope - only one mountaintop away.
UNC is the founding partner of the SOAR consortium and will lead the gamma-ray burst research conducted there. SOAR will use PROMPT gamma-ray bursts as cosmic backlights to probe the early universe in even more powerful ways.
The PROMPT project is the brainchild of Reichart, who received the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Robert J. Trumpler Award for top doctoral dissertation research in North America in 2003. His research, which links gamma-ray bursts to the deaths of massive stars, also made Science Magazine's "Top 10 Breakthroughs in Science" list in 1999.
Note: Contact Reichart at (919) 962-5310 or reichart@physics.unc.edu For the names and contact information for collaborative researchers at other institutions, contact Dee Reid at (919) 843-6339 or deereid@unc.edu
UNC College of Arts and Sciences contact: Dee Reid, (919) 843-6339 or deereid@unc.edu
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