When �ֲ���ý Associate Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic arrived at �ֲ���ý in 2016, the term “odd radio circle” — which refers to the massive rings that encircle entire galaxies — didn’t even exist, because astronomers hadn’t discovered them.

In 2019, using a powerful new telescope in Australia, scientists scanning the skies picked up something new: bizarre circles of radio emissions, which they dubbed “odd radio circles.” But they didn’t have a clue what caused them.

Now they do, thanks to a team of scientists, including Diamond-Stanic, who for the first time helped explain the puzzling phenomenon by finding evidence that suggests the odd radio circles were caused by ancient galactic winds.

Extensively covered in the media this week, the team’s findings and presented at the American Astronomical Society conference in New Orleans.

Being on the cutting edge of science is “something that doesn’t happen every day,” said Diamond-Stanic. “So that, in my mind, was one of the most significant aspects of this particular work: Taking something that no one even knew about a few years ago and actually being able to move that forward. It’s cool.” 

The team of scientists, led by Alison Coil, the chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California San Diego, used a two-pronged approach to uncover the source of the odd radio circles, also known as ORCs (no relation to Tolkien’s fictional monsters).

Diamond-Stanic is proud to be part of a team to “make an important contribution to understanding something we didn’t even really know about a few years ago.” 

The first was observation. Using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the team, including Diamond-Stanic, looked at one specific odd radio circle, known as ORC 4, which is the only one that can be seen from the Northern Hemisphere. Then, they turned to other collaborators who ran simulations to help explain how the circles got there.

The approach — data collection coupled with simulations — helped the researchers home in on a possible answer: The radio rings are from outflowing galactic winds that howled for hundreds of millions of years before abruptly shutting off, creating a shock that left behind a radio ring.

Diamond-Stanic is proud of the groundbreaking collaborative work and “being part of a team that was able to collect a certain piece of data, connect with people who run computer simulations, and make an important contribution to scientific understanding.” 

The team of astronomers that included Diamond-Stanic gathered the data in March 2022 when they had reserved time at the Keck Observatory to study starburst galaxies. Then, more or less on a whim, the team decided to look at the large rings of ORC 4 through the spectrograph to learn more about the optical emission lines produced by ORC 4, which is more than 10 times larger than the Milky Way. It was the first time that optical data had been gathered on ORCs, which previously were only viewed through radio emissions. 

What they observed was an unusually high amount of compressed gas from an ancient starburst formation.

“It was a little bit of a serendipitous use, to point at this particular source of interest,” Diamond-Stanic said. “And in that hour we happened to see something that was surprising. It was kind of like, ‘Huh, that’s weird.’”

Their working hypothesis: The starburst galaxies that drove the odd radio circles had their peak activity further back in time, hundreds of millions of years ago, and the odd radio circle was a relic of that outflowing galactic wind. 

When a large cluster of stars die and explode, they simultaneously force gas out of the galaxy, creating outflowing winds. 

“Sure enough, there is this sort of surprisingly bright extended emission line from this feature of ionized oxygen. And so we see this particular feature extended around this particular galaxy,” Diamond-Stanic said. 

The team of scientists shared their data with Coil’s UCSD-based team, and they connected with colleagues with expertise in running the simulations: Cassandra Lochhaas at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and Drummond Fielding at the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. What the simulations revealed was that the enormous odd rings were from massive outflowing galactic winds from exploding stars, estimated to be about a billion years old.

“We could actually see the outflowing gas extended to large scales around galaxies and then sort of connected to it,” Diamond-Stanic said. “We think this is a really important process that explains why galaxies are pretty inefficient at forming stars throughout the history of the universe.”

Even those who never look into the night sky and wonder about stars or galaxies may find the new research interesting, Diamond-Stanic said, because ORCs help to explain how the galaxy we live in came to be.

“Understanding our cosmic contexts is connected to how galaxies formed and have changed through cosmic time and what sort of phases they’ve gone through,” said Diamond-Stanic, who is on sabbatical this year, spending part of his time doing research at the Roux Institute at Northeastern University in Portland.

Another exciting element of the new finding for Diamond-Stanic is the role his students played in his study of galactic winds in these compact starburst galaxies. Often with student researchers, Diamond-Stanic’s lab at �ֲ���ý uses datasets from telescopes on Earth and in space — such as the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope — to study the interactions of gases within galaxies. 

In 2021, one of Diamond-Stanic’s scholarly papers, cited in the landmark research published in Nature, included work that involved �ֲ���ý students who gathered data from a telescope in New Mexico for their independent studies. 

“Undergraduates at �ֲ���ý are doing core work in advancing our understanding of what exactly this data is telling us,” Diamond-Stanic said. “(At �ֲ���ý) we’ve been studying in some sense the exact same galaxies and sort of related galaxies with complementary data to try to learn new things about what’s going on — what the current rate of star formation is in those galaxies.”

This week, while Diamond-Stanic enjoyed the media buzz around the important finding — which included coverage by CNN, The Daily Mail, and NPR — he missed being able to share the news with his students in his classroom at �ֲ���ý.

While being away from campus on a sabbatical is “a refreshing and rejuvenating opportunity to focus more on my research and scholarship this year, but in many ways my teaching and my work with students often provides a lot of the inspiration for the scholarship, and vice versa,” Diamond-Stanic said.

“Having that full connection, that’s something I’m looking forward to next year.”

His research on the 2021 paper was funded by three grants totaling more than $230,000, including one from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Space Telescope Science Institute. Diamond-Stanic’s ongoing work with �ֲ���ý students is currently funded by two other grants totaling $166,000. All told, 36 �ֲ���ý students have conducted research with him.

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So much has changed.

”In about seven days, we converted it to an online environment with faculty who had largely never taught in that environment and students who had largely never learned in that environment,” says Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Jonathan Cavellero.

But some things haven’t changed, say these �ֲ���ý professors, who, from their new off-campus workspaces, share insights and takeaways after two weeks of teaching their students remotely.

Video by Theophil Syslo.

The strong bond between students and their professors hasn’t weakened. “I still care about my students — as individuals, people on an intellectual and personal journey,” says Su Langdon, visiting assistant professor of psychology. “I still want them to succeed.”

And the students are still diving into schoolwork.  “I am still teaching a community of students that are enthusiastic about learning the Japanese language,” says Lecturer in Japanese Keiko Konoeda.

Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks is impressed. ”I’ve got to give it to them,” she says of her students. “They’re pulling through … They are absolutely stepping up to the plate.”

The faculty who appear in this �ֲ���ý News video, in order, are:

• Rebecca Fraser-Thill, Visiting Instructor in Psychology
• Joshua Rubin, Lecturer in Anthropology
• Keiko Konoeda, Lecturer in Japanese
• Michael Rocque, Associate Professor of Sociology
• Jonathan Cavallero, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies
• Lori Banks, Assistant Professor of Biology
• Su Langdon, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
• Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, Assistant Professor of Physics
• Stephanie Pridgeon, Assistant Professor of Spanish

Astronomers know that most gas in the universe exists outside galaxies, largely in a region called the circumgalactic medium. For years, researchers have created models to replicate how this medium formed and evolved, but direct evidence to support the models has been difficult to come by.

Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Now such evidence is in hand. A group of astronomers, including Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic of �ֲ���ý, recently discovered massive plumes of gas, hundreds of thousands of light-years across, emanating from the distant galaxy Makani.

And according to a new article in Nature co-authored by Diamond-Stanic, this discovery provides crucial new confirmation of galactic winds’ role in creating the circumgalactic medium.

Much to the scientists’ delight, the images of Makani and nearby gas flows match existing models.

This animation shows the galaxy Makani enveloped in its gas cloud. It was created using data from the Keck Cosmic Web Imager by David Tree & Peter Richardson, Games and Visual Effects Research Lab, University of Hertfordshire.

“We’re seeing an image that we’ve only seen in cartoon [models] previously,” Diamond-Stanic says. “It shows that very large-scale galactic winds — or galactic outflows — are driving gas and filling up the circumgalactic medium.”

The lead authors of the study on Makani are David S.N. Rupke of Rhodes College and Alison Coil of the University of California San Diego, joined by collaborators from around the world.

Diamond-Stanic helped develop the proposal to study a sample of galaxies that includes Makani; ran code to determine the galaxies’ mass; and took part in discussions about how to interpret the data about Makani.

The paper suggests that the masses of gases surrounding Makani, which means “wind” in Hawaiian, are in part a byproduct of the formation of the galaxy from the merger of two separate galaxies. The collision finished up about 10 million years before the astronomers observed it — quite recently, in astronomical terms — and resulted in the rapid creation of new stars, which drove surrounding gas and dust out of the galaxy.

Another source of the outflow is a different event, which took place about 400 million years before the scientists observed it, and may have happened earlier in the galactic merger process. The gas plumes are mind-bogglingly huge: about 100 kiloparsecs across, or 300,000 light-years.

Like many scientific breakthroughs, that the astronomers were able to discover Makani’s galactic winds at all was due to quick thinking and a stroke of luck. Diamond-Stanic says Coil of UCSD was at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii studying a different set of galaxies and found she had a bit of extra time.

So she directed the telescope toward Makani and quickly made an observation using the new Keck Cosmic Web Imager, which can trace the ionized oxygen that gets blown around the galaxy along with other gases.

Diamond-Stanic and his colleagues received the resulting image the following day and recognized its significance straight away. The picture, which looks like a Rorschach ink blot to the untrained eye, shows enormous arms of ionized oxygen with a tiny dark dot — the galaxy itself — in the center.

“These photons have been traveling for five billion years, and they just happen to have hit this particular telescope over a 20-minute period,” he says. “You knew immediately there was something exciting.”

In the coming months, Diamond-Stanic and the team will observe Makani again, using instruments that can detect other atoms and molecules. They’ll also study similar galaxies to see if galactic winds affect the circumgalactic medium in the same way.

“We can ask next-order questions: ‘Is this actually what we expected in detail?’ and ‘How often do we see something like this?’” Diamond-Stanic says. “The goal is to say, ‘We have these dozens of galaxies, and Makani is the first one we observed.’”

That Diamond-Stanic and his colleagues work on near-incomprehensible scales — when 10 million years ago is recent, and an entire galaxy is classified as a single “object” in space — is not lost on him.

“It’s fun to think about yourself in that context,” he says, “how large the universe is and how incredibly large a galaxy is relative to Earth or relative to the sun — and now we’re talking about something [the circumgalactic medium] that’s 10 times larger than a galaxy.”

Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic works with ���Dz�é Ruiz during the summer of 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

At such large scales, the line between the measurement of time and space blurs. Makani is five billion light-years away from Earth, which means that the light emitted from the galaxy takes five billion years to get here, where astronomers can observe it. The 10- and 400-million-year-old outflow events happened 10 and 400 million, plus five billion, years ago.

It so happens that our solar system formed not long after.

“We’re actually seeing, in a different galaxy, what was happening around the time the sun and Earth formed,” Diamond-Stanic says. “We’re seeing a process that keeps gas outside of galaxies and, perhaps, prevents the formation of the next generation of stars.

“It’s something I try to keep connected to as I’m staring at blobby pictures on a computer screen.”

As the summer sun set over Meetinghouse Pond in Phippsburg, Maine, on July 29, the show got started.

This time-lapse video, filmed at the college’s Coastal Center at Shortridge by �ֲ���ý photographer Theophil Syslo, kicks off with the afternoon sun barreling toward the western horizon.

After a fade to black, the video picks up again around 11 p.m. with the viewer looking south. The camera then pans to the west and then north. The segment ends around 1 a.m.

All the while, the sky appears to rotate, due to the Earth’s rotation. (The camera itself is moving and rotating, too, thanks to Syslo’s.) The 22-second video comprises hundreds of still images taken 40 seconds apart. The night images were taken with a 30-second exposure to effectively capture starlight.

This time-lapse video begins with the sun setting over Meetinghouse Pond on July 29. Then the night show gets started.

“That’s cool!” said Assistant Professor of Physics Aleks Diamond-Stanic after viewing the video.

He said more, in fact. A researcher who studies the interactions of gas within galaxies, Diamond-Stanic offered to be our guide to the Maine sky. (For help identifying planets, stars, and constellations, he recommends this .)

At the video’s 10-second mark, Diamond-Stanic notes that “the Milky Way extends across the sky, more or less vertically, from the constellation Sagittarius, near the horizon, to the constellation Sagitta, near the top of the screen.”

Also prominent, he says, is Jupiter, “to the right of the Milky Way, lower in the sky, a bit above the star Antares. Saturn is visible to the left of the Milky Way.”

At around the 20-second mark — nearing midnight — “we see the blue star Vega high in the sky, while Jupiter disappears from our field of view,” he says. Meanwhile, low in the sky at right is the Big Dipper (Ursa Major). “We see the star Arcturus about to set below the horizon,” and, since the view is now to the north, “the North Star (Polaris) is at top right.”

Four items in the night sky above the Coastal Center at Shortridge; (1) the Milky Way; (2) Jupiter; (3) the trail of a passenger jet during the 30 seconds of the image exposure, with red dots indicating its flashing beacon; and (4) light from the city of Portland, made prominent by the long exposure. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

Besides heavenly bodies, viewers of the video can see occasional streaks of light. Those aren’t meteors but the paths of passenger planes with their beacons flashing, likely heading toward Europe.

In fact, the nighttime skies over Maine are a popular route for jets traveling east toward Europe. And in the morning, jets often pass overhead traveling west, arriving from Europe. (U.S. airlines typically fly more overnight routes to Europe so their planes can make return flights on the day they arrive.)

Meanwhile, the diffuse light seen on the western horizon comes from the city of Portland, about 25 miles down the coast. While Maine has some of the  — perfect for stargazing — light pollution worldwide continues to increase. It’s becoming “difficult for people to be able to see and appreciate the beauty of the dark night sky,” says Diamond-Stanic.

“The clear view of the night sky shown in this time lapse motivates human curiosity about our place in the universe.”

Seen in 2017, Assistant Professor of Physics Aleks Diamond-Stanic works with ���Dz�é Ruiz ’19, who graduated in May with a physics degree. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

About an hour’s drive from campus in Phippsburg, the �ֲ���ý College Coastal Center at Shortridge sits on 80 acres of woodlands and wetlands. The center provides residential support for academic programs and extracurricular activities, including facilities for field research, meetings, retreats, and conferences.

Adjacent to the center is �ֲ���ý–Morse Mountain Conservation Area, comprising some 600 acres of permanently protected salt marshes and coastal uplands that �ֲ���ý manages for research and educational purposes.

The universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies, many of which spit out gas and dust in a phenomenon called galactic outflow. It’s a high-speed process: In the most extreme cases, outflows can top 1,000 kilometers a second.

In a rare collaborative senior thesis project, Cristopher Thompson of Macon, Ga., and Kingdell Valdez of North Andover, Mass., are using data from the Hubble Space Telescope to, as Valdez says, “find out the characteristics and properties of our galaxies that are responsible for these extremely fast outflows.”

In doing so, they’re helping to wrap up a multi-year, NASA-funded effort to understand how gas leaves galaxies, which in turn can tell us about the nature of the stars and black holes in the galaxies.

Thompson and Valdez’s adviser, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, runs the �ֲ���ý Galaxies Lab, which looks at how gas enters and leaves galaxies and the role of gas in the formation of stars.

Kingdell S. Valdez ‘19 and Cristopher Thompson ’19, pictured in a physics lab in Carnegie Science Hall, analyzed 12 distant galaxies using data from the Hubble Space Telescope. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The Galaxies Lab has two overarching projects: contributing to the MaNGA project, which maps nearby galaxies using the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico; and looking at galaxies with the most extreme characteristics, using Hubble data. Other telescopes come into play as well: In 2018, Diamond-Stanic’s lab used NASA’s high-flying SOFIA telescope to zoom in on a single galaxy.

As in most �ֲ���ý science labs, students are integral to the research, in this case analyzing the data that comes in from the telescopes. Credit for their senior thesis might just be for one semester, but the work that goes into the final document might span years.

“To see a project from beginning to end takes more than a semester, takes more than an academic year,” Diamond-Stanic says. “Being able to combine work over the summer with work done for thesis gets you closer to being done.”

Thompson and Valdez have both worked as summer research assistants in the Galaxies Lab and continued to work in the lab over the course of a few semesters. Once it came time to do their thesis, they both pivoted to galaxies with extreme outflows as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Their work is supported by a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, a NASA organization that operates Hubble. Diamond-Stanic is the principal investigator on the grant, which includes several institutions across the U.S. and U.K.

Several students over the past two years have worked with data from optical light profiles of the 12 extreme galaxies — pictures of the wavelengths of light that are visible to us. In addition to optical wavelengths, Thompson and Valdez are now looking into images depicting wavelengths that are too short or too long for the human eye to see.

Astronauts F. Story Musgrave and Jeffrey A. Hoffman repair parts of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993. The telescope provided data for a three-year project, headed by Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, on galaxies with extreme behaviors. (Wikimedia Commons)

Thompson and Valdez will turn in separate thesis documents at the end of the semester, but their work on the dozen-galaxy sample is intertwined. Thompson is measuring the radius of each galaxy and figuring out how bright it is at the center and edges.

He’s “taking the radii, putting it through a program that’s already been written, getting these effective values for these radii, then trying to understand how the system is actually producing these radii,” Thompson says.

Valdez, meanwhile, is concerned with the mass of the stars in the galaxies. “I have to look at the ages of these galaxies, and I have to look at dust attenuation,” or the way that dust filters light as it reaches the telescope, he says.

For both seniors, the research involves poring over work that other astronomers have conducted, understanding what previous thesis students have done, and writing codes that form raw data from the telescope images into a model that explains the galaxy’s characteristics.

“You’re going back and essentially revising this code, leaving in your footprints and comments that point to what [piece of code] does what, in addition to when it works,” Thompson says. “Those are the moments when you’re like, ‘Awesome!’”

“It feels good to leave your footprint for upcoming years.”

Thomson’s and Valdez’s efforts have supported and added detail to conclusions that other astronomers have reached, and their analysis has added information that will help astronomers infer how much mass the stars in each galaxy have, as well as the stars’ ages and other characteristics.

So why do the dozen galaxies have such fast outflows? They’re “compact starburst galaxies,” Valdez says. “They have a relatively small volume, and they have lots of stars being formed at an abnormally fast pace. There’s all sorts of properties that are implied from those two characteristics that result in the higher outflows.”

The project has given Thompson and Valdez the chance to present their research and join a larger community of scientists. In October, they presented a poster at SACNAS, the National Diversity in STEM Conference.

Cristopher Thompson and Kingdell Valdez discuss a physics problem in a Carnegie Science Hall physics lab. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“When I got there I was like, I didn’t know this many people of color studied STEM,” Valdez says. “It was a great relief, especially being here at �ֲ���ý. Oftentimes we’re the only ones in our classrooms that are people of color studying physics.”

At the end of summer 2019, when the Space Telescope Science Institute grant period ends, Thompson’s and Valdez’s work will be key to a paper Diamond-Stanic will submit to The Astrophysical Journal.

“It feels good to be able to contribute something to Aleks’s lab, to leave your footprint for upcoming years,” Thompson says.

“We’re also standing on the shoulders of giants,” Valdez adds. “There are others who have done lots of work with Aleks that we’re piggybacking off of, but also building on top of.

“There’s a good mixture of relying on the past but looking towards the future.”

When NASA agreed to help Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic observe a distant galaxy, the agency threw in a bonus: seats for the professor and his students aboard the world’s largest airborne observatory.

Known as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, the repurposed Boeing 747 carries a 2.5-meter telescope capable of detecting infrared radiation from billions of light-years away.

Flying at 40,000 feet, SOFIA is able to rise above many of the infrared emissions from Earth’s atmosphere that might interfere with readings from such a faraway galaxy.

Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic snaps a selfie with his students, Jose Ruiz ’19 and Becca Minsley ’20, in front of SOFIA, the world’s largest airborne observatory.

A powerful telescope at a great height was what Diamond-Stanic needed to observe the galaxy J1613+2834, which is 4.7 billion light-years away and has a black hole at the center.

Ultimately, he wants to parse out “the ultimate power source of the light produced by such galaxies, in particular the balance between light from newly formed stars and light from a supermassive black hole,” he says.

Part of a consortium, led by Christy Tremonti of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, that studies such galaxies to understand star formation, Diamond-Stanic works closely with �ֲ���ý students on these questions. He invited two of them along for the ride: ���Dz�é Ruiz ’19 of Lawrence, Mass., and Becca Minsley ’20 of New York City.

Before takeoff, Becca Minsley ’20 and Jose Ruiz ’19 pose in front of SOFIA’s 2.5-meter telescope, which can detect infrared emissions from billions of light-years away. (Courtesy of Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic)

Ruiz and Minsley had both spent summers in Diamond-Stanic’s Galaxies Lab. And both had traveled with Diamond-Stanic to New Mexico’s Apache Point Observatory. Minsley has worked alongside other students in the lab analyzing data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

“It’s cool to see the ways to try to get any data, any information about these types of galaxies from all of these different sources,” Minsley says.

“In reality the telescope was not moving. The airplane was moving around the telescope.”

To get data from this particular source, Diamond-Stanic, Ruiz, and Minsley traveled to Palmdale, Calif., where SOFIA is based, on Sept. 21. On the day of the flight, Minsley was unable to go along, but after safety and scientific briefings, Diamond-Stanic and Ruiz boarded the plane.

SOFIA took off with some uncertainty — though its telescope is one of the most powerful around, detecting a galaxy 4.7 billion light-years away was “pushing the limits of what anyone’s actually tried with SOFIA,” Diamond-Stanic said.

Assistant Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic (center) and his research students Becca Minsley ’20 and ���Dz�é Ruiz ’19 pose outside the college’s Stephens Observatory just before heading off to California. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

As the sun set, SOFIA flew from Palmdale over Los Angeles and off the coast. Over the next 10 hours, the plane crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean, turning whenever the telescope needed to point to a different part of the sky. Surrounded by computer monitors that display the data it collects, the telescope sticks out an open door near the back of the aircraft.

“I noticed that the telescope was moving,” Ruiz said, “but in reality the telescope was not moving. The airplane was moving around the telescope.”

“That’s our galaxy!”

For the first few hours, the �ֲ���ý team tried to catch up on schoolwork and listened to the chatter between the pilots and air traffic control and among the NASA scientists aboard. Then, midway through the flight, SOFIA turned northeast toward British Columbia so that the telescope pointed at Diamond-Stanic’s target galaxy.

Ruiz and Diamond-Stanic watched the monitors as the data came in, looking for any sign of the galaxy. Soon, a shape appeared. A technician drew a circle around it. Diamond-Stanic snapped a picture.

“That’s our galaxy!” he said. To a lay person, it looked like a white blob. But “it’s beautiful to me,” Diamond-Stanic said.

SOFIA will make a total of five observations of J1613+2834 over the next month. NASA scientists will then process the data, subtracting the infrared emissions of the sky near Earth so that the galaxy will be easier to observe. Diamond-Stanic, along with colleagues at several universities and students in his own lab, will further analyze the data.

Data from the SOFIA telescope feeds into a computer monitor on the aircraft, allowing Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic and Jose Ruiz ’19 to ”see” their target galaxy. (Courtesy of Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic)

But in addition to collecting valuable data, Diamond-Stanic hopes the trip exposed his students to a “larger astronomical community.”

“It’s an opportunity for students to see what these research-class facilities look like and what it might be like to work at one,” he says.

Minsley said that seeing the SOFIA data gave her a more comprehensive sense of how astronomers and astrophysicists gather information, whether it’s from the Hubble Space Telescope or a mountaintop observatory or 40,000 feet in the air.

“The coolest part was realizing the connection between all these other projects,” she says. “It’s like trying to collect puzzle pieces, or scraps of clues, to try and create a composite image of what’s really happening.”

On the window sill of his third-floor Carnegie Science office, Assistant Professor of Physics Aleks Diamond-Stanic has a large aluminum plate peppered with 1,400 tiny holes.

As he’s crossing campus, Diamond-Stanic can spot the disc from the courtyard between Coram and Ladd libraries. He’s also able to see it from a walkway that passes Hedge. Sometimes he pauses, looks past a couple of trees that partially block the view, and thinks, “There’s my office!”

It’s nice to know about the view, but what about the plate? While it looks like a crazy pizza screen, Diamond-Stanic’s plate was once used by astronomers with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, based at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, to collect spectra from objects throughout the universe.

Each night, the SDSS uses different plates to measure a small part of the night sky, about the size of one’s palm stretched out at arm’s length. Each hole in the plate — corresponding to an object in space, such as a star or galaxy — has an optical fiber plugged into it to measure the object’s spectrum.

After the mapping is done, the plates are distributed by request to scientists and educators. The SDSS has used thousands of spectroscopic plug plates in its 14-year history.

Diamond-Stanic says the plate symbolizes a connection between his work at �ֲ���ý and SDSS, a multinational collaboration among dozens of institutions that is creating three-dimensional maps of the universe with unprecedented detail.

“This is our piece of the larger effort,” he says. “It’s a real scientific piece of equipment that was used to obtain the kind of data that our undergraduate researchers work with at �ֲ���ý.”

In fall 2016, �ֲ���ý joined the SDSS as an associate institutional member. “We get access to proprietary data that is a big part of what we’re working on with the students in our Galaxies Lab this summer,” Diamond-Stanic says.

He’s talking about the �ֲ���ý Astrophysics Galaxy Evolution Lab. The “BAGEL,” as he calls it, uses datasets from telescopes on Earth and in space to study the interactions of gas within galaxies — how gas forms stars and fuels the growth of supermassive black holes within galaxies, and how energy and momentum from massive stars and black holes expels gas from galaxies.

In April, Diamond-Stanic took three student researchers — Kwamae Delva ’18, Eve Cinquino ’19, and Jose Ruiz ’18 — to the Apache Point Observatory. There, they designed and executed their own program using the observatory’s 3.5 meter telescope.

This summer, Diamond-Stanic has a team of nine �ֲ���ý students working on three projects, each driven by “data from that same mountaintop.”

How many little kids can �ֲ���ý entertain and educate in one night? That was the question on April 3 as �ֲ���ý astronomy students presented their “Astronomy Extravaganza” for local schoolchildren.

By evening’s end, the answer was evident: nearly 250 children from Lewiston and Auburn elementary and middle schools had enjoyed offerings that ranged from hands-on activities with telescopes and moon phases to interactive planetarium shows about the stars’ movement in our night sky.

Isla Shea, 6, of East Auburn School, uses a telescope to view the moon as Evan Goldberg ’19 looks on during the Astronomy Extravaganza on April 3. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Bella, a first-grader from Martel Elementary in Lewiston, loved a constellation game presented in Carnegie Science Hall because she was able to figure out which groups of stars she could see on her birthday.

“I have never thought about the stars before,” Bella said. “I loved being able to have fun and learn about them at the same time!”

Alexia, a second-grader from Farwell Elementary in Lewiston, was jumping with excitement before walking into a planetarium show. “Wow! I love science!”

The event was the brainchild of Assistant Professor of Physics Aleks Diamond-Stanic, who teamed up with one of the department’s assistants in instruction, Nicole Hastings, and with Ellen Alcorn and Brenna Callahan of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

The event featured projects, posters, and demonstrations inside Carnegie and Chase Hall, as well as outside between the two buildings, and everything staffed by students in Diamond-Stanic’s course “Introduction to Astronomy.”

The program was inspired by similar experiences that Diamond-Stanic, new to �ֲ���ý this year, had with middle-school students during his graduate studies at the University of Arizona. “I find it rewarding to see children engage in the process of discovery,” he said, “and I feel compelled to find ways to encourage their scientific interest, capacity, and identity.”

At the same time, he wanted a venue for his own �ֲ���ý students to “share their new knowledge of astronomy with grade-school students.”

Diamond-Stanic’s three children — ages 8, 4, 1 — attended the extravaganza. The older two are in Lewiston public schools, and it was great, he said, to “see �ֲ���ý students actively facilitating the process of learning and discovery for so many young children, including my own.”

A boy engages with the Connect the Constellations display as Emily Morse ’17 of Machias, Maine, watches in the Carnegie Science Hall lobby. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Happiness ruled the evening, paving the way for future events, he said.

“Connections between what we are doing in our department and what is being done in the Harward Center are useful and gratifying. I want to continue to focus on sparking interest in students and increasing their capacity to do whatever it is that they want to do.”

The college’s new high-performance computing setup is not visually dazzling, at least compared with the huge computer we remember from Batman’s Batcave, circa 1968. It occupies barely half of a 6-foot-tall computer rack.

But then again, the computing setup, known as a “cluster” because it links 12 separate computers, doesn’t need to fill a whole cave. And perhaps most important, it’s a shared resource — not reserved for one or two superheroes.

“Ours is for anyone who has the need to examine data in a deep way.”

While many colleges have high-performance computing clusters, it’s not uncommon for them to be appropriated by a few faculty members (superheroes, as it were).

�ֲ���ý’ HPCC, however, is designed as a “community-based resource as opposed to one that would just benefit specific faculty members,” explains Andrew White, director of academic and client services for Information and Library Services. “Ours is for anyone who has the need to examine data in a deep way.”

Jeffrey Oishi, the college’s new computational astrophysicist, visits the HPCC where it lives: in a ground-floor hub room in Kalperis Hall at 65 Campus Ave. (Jay Burns/�ֲ���ý College)

One of those people is Jeff Oishi, the college’s new computational astrophysicist. He’ll be a power user, and some of his research funds helped to purchase the HPCC, which sits in a 15-by-17 hub room in the basement of Kalperis Hall, one of the college’s two new residences on Campus Avenue.

Oishi calls the HPCC “the once and future” of computing. “Once” because sharing was once the way to access powerful computing, and “future” because it anticipates how �ֲ���ý will use and expand the HPCC.

When it comes to an HPCC, “high performance” has the same meaning as it does for a 1971 Plymouth Hemi Cuda muscle car. It means extraordinary power.

For Oishi and his student researchers, this computing power will run models that explain how gases flow inside the atmospheres of giant planets like Jupiter. In one project, they will use an approximation known as linearization to model how gases go from stable to unstable. In a second project, Oishi’s team will do 3D simulations of these transitions.

When a big job comes to the HPCC from Oishi’s lab in Carnegie Science, the job goes first to one of the 12 computers, each of which are known as “nodes.” The receiving node, called the “head node,” is the traffic cop that manages requests and draws on the other 11 nodes’ computing power as needed.

In computer parlance, this gabfest is called “all-to-all” communication and it’s a hallmark of high-performance computing.

“The head node splits up the job, with pieces going to everybody else,” explains Jim Bauer, director of network and infrastructure services for ILS.  “The nodes all communicate with each other, assemble the results, and send it back to the head node.”

As the job gets crunched and all the processors inside all the nodes swing into action, each processor is “talking with every other processor all the time,” Oishi says. It’s an overlapping conversation, like a Robert Altman movie. In computer parlance, this gabfest is called “all-to-all” communication and it’s a hallmark of high-performance computing.

The speed of this conversation depends on a dazzling array of pricey cables that connect the head node to the other nodes and each node to one another. So while you can use $2 HDMI cables for your home theater, in this case, “cables do matter,” says Bauer. Collectively called “fabric,” all this high-speed networking allows data to whip around at 100 gigabytes per second, the gold standard of high-speed computing.

High-speed (100 gigabytes per second) cables and networking, known as “fabric,” connect the 12 nodes of the HPCC.

The �ֲ���ý fabric is distinctive, Bauer says. “We went with new technology,” known as Intel Omni-Path, “that is more cost-effective and twice as fast” as typical fabric uses in an HPCC.

In terms of computing specs, each of the 12 nodes in the �ֲ���ý HPCC has 28 cores, the processing units that do the work, for a total of 336 cores. A team from Dell helped �ֲ���ý design the setup, and it has 1.5 terabytes of RAM and 48 terabytes of disk space.

By historical comparison, the first academic computer that �ֲ���ý purchased, in 1979, was a Prime 550 with roughly three-quarters of a megabyte of RAM and 300 megabytes of storage space.

“It was a leader of its day,” says Bauer, and it could process 700,000 “instructions” per second. “The HPCC runs at just under six billion instructions per second.”

That’s impressive, but computing power is relative, of course. To meet computing needs that are even bigger, Oishi uses NASA’s Pleiades Supercomputer, which has nearly 200,000 cores compared to �ֲ���ý’ 336. “But otherwise, it’s built on nodes almost identical to ours,” he says.

As he meets the �ֲ���ý HPCC for the first time, Oishi says he’s “impressed by how small the cluster is” compared with some that he’s used in the past.

Since computers today use so much less power than their forebears, they give off less heat, which means the components of an HPCC can be packed close together — notwithstanding the air-conditioning that blasts away from one corner of the room.

Had Oishi arrived at �ֲ���ý as a solo computational physicist, the college might have created a one-off HPC setup for him. But Oishi — who is the co-principal investigator of a NASA grant that will send $114,000 to �ֲ���ý to support his research on stellar magnetism — was joined this fall by another new assistant professor of physics, Aleks Diamond-Stanic.

Himself the holder of a $108,000 grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute to study the stellar mass of starbursts, Diamond-Stanic uses big data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to study the evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes. So he, too, had big-time computing needs.

The �ֲ���ý HPCC setup is known as the ‘condo’ model: While the infrastructure belongs to the college and professors sort of “buy into it.”

The pair’s arrival — and the anticipation that more and more faculty will need powerful computing resources — created a critical mass for the HPCC project, says White. “When Jeff talked to us about his needs, and Aleks talked about his needs, we saw a way to support them while serving the larger �ֲ���ý community, too.”

Assistant Professor of Physics Aleks Diamond-Stanic will use the HPCC to crunch big data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

In fact, White, Bauer, and others had already been testing some ideas for HPC at �ֲ���ý. “Thanks to Aleks and Jeff, we went from zero to 60 just like that,” White says.

The �ֲ���ý HPCC setup is known as the ‘condo’ model: The infrastructure belongs to the college, and professors sort of “buy into it,” Oishi says. That is, he and Diamond-Stanic, have contributed some of their startup funds — research dollars that the college provides to new faculty — to purchase new nodes. In return, they’ll have priority access.

”I think that’s a really great model because it’s expandable and it’s flexible,” says Oishi. Indeed, the fact that the HPCC rack is currently only half-full anticipates that more faculty will buy into the “condo,” especially professors in the college’s new Digital and Computational Studies Program, slated to debut as a major in fall 2018.

In that sense, the �ֲ���ý HPCC will “support our current faculty and help us attract new colleagues,” says White.

Thirty years ago, if you wanted access to powerful computing, you tapped into a shared resource. By the 1990s, when Oishi was at the American Museum of Natural History, things had changed.

At the museum, he worked with a computational biologist, Ward Wheeler, who was custom-building his own HPCCs to research the evolution of tree DNA over the past 500 million years. Ward’s budget wasn’t huge, Oishi recalls, “but he realized that he could order parts,” such as processors and cases “from a commodity source, get a team of people in his office with screwdrivers, and put them all together over a weekend.”

Fast forward a decade, to when Oishi was a postdoc at Berkeley, and every researcher with any kind of budget was building their own HPCC. “It fell to the faculty member or a grad student to maintain them because the IT department would say, ‘Do whatever you want but we’re not touching that. You brought it in, you built it, you put it in your closet.’ And we were running out of closet space.”

That created waste and redundancy, so by around 2010 colleges and universities began to move back to offering shared high-performance computing resources. “They stepped in and said, ‘Let us do this for you,’” Oishi says.