Curator speaks about modern astrophysics

by Renee Tomcanin

staff writer

Students were seeing stars on March I 3 in the Widener Center Lecture Hall. David DeVorkin, curator of the National Air and Space Museum, spoke on the history of modern astrophysics and provided visual aids to help make his ideas clearer.

The most important concept to come from his speech was from women researchers in the 1920s: "Everything is in the details."

Details were important in many of the discoveries that have been made about how the universe is situated. If scientists and researchers would have passed over tiny observations, we may still believe today that the Earth is the center of the solar system. A detail, many times less than the thickness of a human hair, caused the Hubbell telescope to take blurry pictures. These are some of the reasons that "everything is in the details."

DeVorkin described the history of modern space exploration and study from the sixteenth century to today and noted the changes that the study of the universe has undergone.

Nowadays there are not many "classical" astronomers. These were the people like Galileo and Sir William Herschel who would sit and observe the stars through telescopes and other instru- ments, charting the movements of objects in the sky. Presently, the majority of the study done on celestial bodies is done using mathematics and physics.

De Vorkin 's lecture was concerned mainly with "what put the physics in astrophysics." It began with questioning what kept the planets in motion. Sir Isaac Newton explained this with the discovery of gravity. Herschel made the next step by noticing the importance of the stars in the universe.

In the 1860s, spectroscopy was introduced to determine the composition of the stars, or the gases that made up each. This lead to the discovery of how stars evolve and eventually die in the twenti- eth century. Saha, Bohr and Einstein then made their theories of the principles of space.

From studying how stars are created and die, nuclear physics was created. The hydrogen and atomic bombs were developed using these concepts of atoms splitting and forming. The space race came next with Sputnik, and then NASA was conceived. Finally, there was the development of the Hubbell telescope, which allowed us to see billions of light years into space.

Kit Dewey, a first-year education major, said, "It was interesting. I thought that it was interesting to see how much science changed so quickly."