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Image from Thursday Night's Event
From Left to Right: Feitosa, Constantin, Virani, Knickerbocker, Faalasli, Anzalone, Chen
Image From https://www.jmu.edu/jmusecafe/ |
What were you doing at 6:30 pm the
evening of Thursday, October 2, 2014?? I’d like to hope that you were attending
the first of four
JMuse Café events centered on
Demystifying the Expert. But,
seeing as the room wasn’t nearly large enough to contain the whole of the JMU
student and faculty body, there’s a good chance you weren’t in attendance.
Luckily for you, I’m going to give you a recap of everything you missed, and,
in doing so, I’ll hopefully convince you not to miss the next event in the
series (which is Thursday, November 6 in the Flex Space located on the third
floor of Rose Library – so go ahead and mark that on your calendar).
The purpose of the Demystifying
the Expert series is to provide the public with a forum in which they can
informally learn about science in a fun and unique way. With the combined
effort of the
JMU Physics and Astronomy department and JMU’s
New and Improv.’d
Comedy Troupe, learning has never been more entertaining. Two physics professors
have coordinated the series of events alongside New and Improv.’d:
AncaConstantin and
Klebert Feitosa. Dr. Constantin’s work outside of the classroom
is studying galaxies and their formation and processes, and Dr. Feitosa (also
known as Dr. Bubbles) studies just that: bubbles! (As a student doing research
in his lab – it is every bit as much fun as it sounds.) New and Improv.’d,
founded in 1998, is JMU’s only improv comedy group. They perform multiple shows
each semester, both on campus at TDU and throughout the community. Be sure to
follow them on social media so you can learn more about them!
The four talks organized for the
2014-2015 academic year are comprised of one expert and a panel of comedians
trying to discern just what the expert’s expertise is. Thursday’s panel was comprised of Trevor
Knickerbocker, Mikail Faalasli, Alan Chen, and Amanda Anzalone. Trevor is a senior Intelligence Analysis major
that took a Quantum Physics class for fun. Mikail is a senior Business major; the
only science he knows is the science of making money. Alan is a sophomore
Physics major who politely asked the audience to remember not all physics is
not astronomy (but all astronomy is physics!) when hearing his answers
throughout the evening. Amanda is a junior Media Arts & Design major with
double majors in Business French and Creative Writing, aka nothing to do with
science. That being said, she felt 100% confident in the evening’s program.
Amanda felt so confident, in fact, that she is returning to
the panel for the event in November. When I asked her about how Thursday went,
she replied with, “It's such
a fun experience and an amazing feeling being able to help bridge the gap
between science and the student body. We are trying to show them that science
doesn't have to be a feared subject!” That last statement means so much when
coming from a student who isn’t actively pursuing a career in science. Science
can have this stigma of being inaccessible to non-scientists, but all it takes
to get people interested and informed is a relaxed setting where people can
laugh and learn.
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Dr. Virani at the John C. Wells Planetarium
Photo Credit: Daniel Stein |
Our expert for the evening was
Dr.Shanil Virani. The panel was not given very much information about the expert
before they began picking his brain. What they were told is Dr. Virani is currently the Director of the
John C. Wells Planetarium located in Miller Hall. He the organizer of the monthly star
parties on east campus and the public science talks that happen twice a
semester. He earned his PhD from Yale University and before that he worked at
the NASA Chandra Space Telescope. As an avid promoter of informal science
education, he was named a NASA Solar System Ambassador two years in a row, 2013 and 2014 - which is no small defeat.
Following the brief introductions
was a series of games and discussions, starting off with a series questions
from the panel to the expert. There was only one catch – the questions had to
be yes or no questions. From this first game, we were able to discern that
Virani is an astronomer who takes pictures, doesn’t study things within our
solar system, and is capable of answering yes when asked if he could answer
seriously “To infinity and beyond!” when asked at a cocktail party what he
studies. It has something, but not everything, to do with black holes and
nothing to do with parallel universes (because, “this is
science”). We learned
that Dr. Virani can see all black holes, however, not all astronomers have that
ability.
When it became apparent that the
panel was not going to coax any more information through yes or no questions,
there was a brief time where Dr. Virani was able to discuss his work. As the panel had been able to discern, Virani
primarily studies black holes – but how does one study something one can’t
see? To explain, he had the audience rub their hands together then stop and
notice that their palms were hotter. Then he had them rub their hands together
faster, imaging they were doing so at the speed of light and imaging just how
hot that would cause their hands to be (around the order of millions of degrees
Kelvin, in case you were wondering). Though we cannot see black holes, we can
detect them and the lurking galaxies that host them by looking for certain
wavelengths of light - gamma rays and
x-rays. Around each black hole is an
accretion disk made up of matter that will eventually fall into a black hole;
these disks are extreme environments, allowing us to study and test exotic
physics such as Einstein’s theory of general relativity. By studying what
happens to space and time around black holes, humanity can be one step closer
to developing a grand unified theory (or as Virani called it, “The Holy Grail
of Physics”) that describes the behavior of nature in our universe.
Every single galaxy has a
supermassive black hole at its center, and Dr. Virani’s purpose in studying them
is to understand how they grow and evolve and the influence they have on their
host galaxies. Observation has shown that there exists an intimate connection
between the formation of a galaxy and the black hole at the center. Dr. Constantin
raised two questions: why should we care about black holes and would we be here
without them? To answer the first question, Virani explained that in order to
better understand black holes, humanity has to develop the skill sets and
technology to do so. These skills and advancements help humanity progress,
sustaining civilization and pushing us into the future. For the second question,
the answer is no. We know that black holes can form when stars collapse inward
on themselves once they have exhausted their fuel. It is in the centers of stars
that all heavy elements (more massive than Lithium on the periodic table) are
formed. As Carl Sagan once said, “The
nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the
carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are
made of star stuff.”
After the discussion came two more games, the first of which
consisted of 5 quiz-like questions concerning acronyms and jargon within
Dr. Virani’s field of expertise. Through this game we learned that AGN stands
for active galactic nuclei (not aperture globular neutrino, one of the 4
choices to the question), which are very bright cores of galaxies. Next we
learned that a galaxy is an enormous collection of stars, gas, and dust bound
together – because the answer with the most words is usually the right one.
Between the second and third questions, Dr. Virani briefly
went into just how vast our universe is. The Milky Way Galaxy, the large spiral
galaxy in which we reside, is home to about 100 billion stars. Over the last 3
years, we have determined that, on average, each star has about 5 planets
orbiting it. Considering that there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the
observable universe, one question arises: how am I supposed to understand such
a large number? The answer is quite simple: you can’t. According to Dr. Virani,
these numbers are “astronomically” large (pun intended…). When you study
astronomy, you deal with things that are very, very large, and when you study
an atom you deal with things that are very, very small. In our lives we don’t
experience these extremes; so, while we can determine such values as the mass
of the earth, our sun, and even the black hole at the center of the Milky Way,
these numbers are still incomprehensible in our every-day life.
The remaining 3 questions in the game taught the audience
that a photon is a particle of light, not a potato from Star Trek, a QSO or
quasar is an incredibly bright galaxy core, not a powerful wizard you don’t
want to mess with, and lastly the Chandra Space Telescope was not named after a
NASA administrator, but a well-known Indian-American physicist who received a Nobel Prize in
physics. Chandrashekhar earned this honor by discovering the Chandrashekhar limit while on a boat trip from
India to Cambridge, UK. He determined that, when at star has at least 1.4 the mass
of our sun, there is nothing to prevent it from becoming a black hole when it
collapses.
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The Very Large Telescope in Chile
Photo from eso.org |
When studying the sky through observation, a dark sky is the
most important thing to have. It is because of this that Chandrashekhar was able to do
the work he did on a boat, and it is also why observational astronomers do a
lot of work in Hawaii – the night sky is dark and clear and the elevation makes
it an ideal location for telescopes. One of the panelists chimed in, asking how
often astronomers run into evil villains at these remote locations near
volcanoes. Ironically enough, one of the James Bond movies was filmed at the
Very Large Telescope in Chile, showing that astronomers are both undeniably
cool and not very skilled with a thesaurus.
The last game was a series of rapid-fire questions about Dr.
Virani through which we learned that his favorite astronomer is Carl Sagan (because
he is fantastic), his dream job when he was little was astronaut, and he would
go to Mars in a heartbeat (who wouldn’t?!). Astrology isn’t real, there is no
known center of the universe, and if Virani had to be on dancing with the
stars, he’d dance with Dr. Constantin. The most important question asked was,
“If you had to let people know one thing about what you do, what would that
be?” This entire blog post could be (alas, it is not) reduced to his answer: “Black holes are at
the center of every galaxy and we don’t know why.”
As the evening came to a close, questions were opened to the
audience. The first, and possibly most important, audience question was
concerning the reluctance to fund space research. Virani’s answer was that it
boils down to a lack of nationwide science literacy. There is a disconnect
between the people who understand science and the people who don’t. Because of this disconnect, there are many social controversies concerning scientific
topics that are by no means scientifically controversial (climate change,
evolution, etc.). It is for this very reason that this series of events exists
– to help the public connect with scientists and promote a well-informed
understanding of the implications of the work scientists do.
Because this is already on the verge of being too long, I
have spared you many of the details of Thursday evening’s event (which says a
lot about the event concerning how much I’ve told you). What you should come
away from this thinking is, “Wow, I really missed out on an awesome event and I
know where I’m going to be on the evening of November 6.” For further information on upcoming events, visit the Facebook pages of
JMuse Café and
JMU Physics and Astronomy!
-Keely Criddle
JMuse Cafe/Physics & Astronomy Blogger
