August 8, 2005
Weeklong astronomy conference honoring UCSC
professors will feature a public lecture on Tuesday, August
9
By Tim Stephens
About 200 astronomers, including many of the world's leading
astrophysicists and cosmologists, are meeting on campus this
week for a weeklong conference to honor three UCSC professors--astronomers
George Blumenthal and Sandra Faber and physicist Joel Primack.
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Top to bottom: George Blumenthal, Sandra Faber, Joel Primack |
Blumenthal, Faber, and Primack have all made fundamental contributions
to the scientific understanding of how galaxies formed and how
the universe has evolved over time. The conference in their
honor, organized to celebrate their 60th birthdays, will address
the recent explosion of observational data in astronomy and
explore its theoretical implications.
As part of the conference, Primack, a professor of physics,
and his wife, Nancy Abrams, will give a public talk entitled
"The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering
Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos." The talk will be
based on their new book by the same title, due to be published
in the spring of 2006.
Primack and Abrams, a writer and songwriter, have a special
interest in the cultural implications of modern cosmology and
have cotaught a course on cosmology and culture at UCSC since
1996. Their presentation will take place from 8 to 10 p.m. on
Tuesday, August 9, in Classroom Unit 2 on the UCSC campus. The
event is free and open to the public. For additional information
about the public lecture, contact Nancy Moore at (831) 459-5092
or nmoore@ucsc.edu.
The title of the conference, "Nearly Normal Galaxies in
a Lambda CDM Universe," refers to the prevailing cold dark
matter (CDM) theory of cosmology. Convincing evidence for dark
matter, which cannot be seen but can be detected indirectly
by observing its gravitational effects, was discovered by astronomers
in the late 1970s. About 85 percent of all the matter in the
universe is thought to be dark matter, while ordinary matter
accounts for the remaining 15 percent. In the 1980s, Blumenthal,
Faber, Primack, and others established the important role of
slow-moving ("cold") dark matter in the formation,
properties, and evolution of galaxies. Their ideas about CDM,
though more than 20 years old, remain the dominant working paradigm
for structure formation in the universe.
The Greek letter lamda in the title refers to a repulsive force
that Albert Einstein added to his 1916 theory of gravity to
counteract the attractive force of gravity so as to preserve
a static universe. Einstein called lambda his "biggest
blunder" after the astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered in
1929 that the universe was not static but expanding. Recent
observations, however, show that the expansion of the universe
is not being slowed by gravity, as expected, but is actually
speeding up. This surprising result suggests that Einstein's
repulsive force, lambda--now called "dark energy"--may
have been right after all.
The conference title also refers back to a landmark conference
held at UCSC in 1986 and documented in a book edited by Faber,
Nearly Normal Galaxies (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1987).
This year's conference is expected to be equally memorable as
one of the major conferences of the decade on galaxy formation.
"Progress in cosmology has been truly astronomical since
the last conference 19 years ago," said David Koo, a professor
of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC who helped organize this
year's conference.
"Using the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Telescopes
finished in the mid-1990s, astronomers can now peer at 'nearly
normal' galaxies 8 billion years further back in time than the
4 billion years possible in 1986, to near the beginning of our
universe just after the Big Bang," Koo said.
Blumenthal, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics, joined
the UCSC faculty in 1972. He continues to investigate the origin
of structure in the universe, such as galaxies and clusters
of galaxies, and the role that dark matter plays in the formation
and evolution of this structure. He also studies related cosmological
issues, such as the generation of density fluctuations during
an early inflationary phase of the universe. In addition to
his work in cosmology, Blumenthal has studied gamma-ray bursts,
accretion disks, and active galactic nuclei and maintains a
strong interest in those areas. He served as chair of the UC
Academic Senate for 2004-05.
Faber, a University Professor of astronomy and astrophysics,
also came to UCSC in 1972. She is a leading authority on telescopes
and astronomical instrumentation, and is renowned for her work
on the role of dark matter in the formation of structure in
the universe. Faber and a group of colleagues were the first
to detect high-speed flows of galaxies on cosmic scales. She
is currently involved in several projects, including a major
survey of distant galaxies (the DEEP Survey), studies of supermassive
black holes in the centers of galaxies, and the development
of adaptive optics systems to sharpen the images of ground-based
telescopes. Her many awards and honors include the Bok Prize
of Harvard University, the Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics,
and election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical
Society.
Primack has done pioneering research in particle physics and
cosmology. His current research in cosmology involves the use
of supercomputers to simulate and visualize the evolution of
the universe and the formation of galaxies. These computer simulations
enable him and his collaborators to compare the predictions
of theories with the observational data. Primack is also active
in addressing policy issues in science and technology, and he
is currently chairman of the American Physical Society Forum
on Physics and Society. His most recent policy work has been
on efforts to protect the near-Earth space environment and on
NASA funding for astrophysics. A fellow of the American Physical
Society and the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, Primack joined the UCSC faculty in 1973.
The conference is sponsored by NASA, the National Science Foundation,
and Orion Telescopes & Binoculars. Additional details about
the conference are available online at astro.ucsc.edu/~nng/.
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