Astronomy
is often called the oldest science -- in many ways, it is also one of the
newest! Our business is the physical study of stars and stellar systems in
the observable universe, what might more properly be called astrophysics.
Because astronomers really can't experiment on stars, experimentalists are
called observers instead. They supply the observational details of
positions, fluxes, and spectra to theoreticians, who model the evolution and
development of objects ranging from comets
to stars to entire galaxies. Scientists who study the surfaces of planets
are more typically found in geology programs,
while scientists who specialize in the study of upper atmospheres and magnetospheres
of planets, and the regions between the planets, are generally housed in space
physics groups.
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The University of Kansas Astronomy Group includes three full-time faculty astronomers (Stephen J. Shawl, Barbara J. Anthony-Twarog, and Bruce Twarog), and three adjunct faculty (Scott Baird - Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Benedictine College, Atchison, Keith Ashman- associate professor in the Physics Department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and Karen Camarda, assistant professor in the Physics Department at Washburn University in Topeka). The ongoing research at KU deals with the observation and intrepretation of single stars and clusters, both within the Milky Way and in nearby galaxies. Among the researchers, use is made of the facilities of the Hubble Space Telescope , Kitt Peak National Observatory and Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory, two federally funded observatories operated in the northern and southern hemispheres of the Americas, Steward Observatory in Arizona and NURO, the National Undergraduate Research Observatory. Our studies are designed to probe the detailed evolution of single stars through their ultraviolet spectra and the polarization of their light scattered from the material in the circumstellar environment of cool stars, the origin and evolution of star clusters through CCD photometric analysis using intermediate-band filters, and the origin and evolution of the Milky Way from study of the oldest field star populations and clusters. Future observational research will include 40% of the available telescope time using the ULTRA 1-m telescope under construction at Mt. Laguna Observatory, in collaboration with San Diego State University.
In addition to the
astronomy group at KU, there are two active research groups in related areas.
Drs. Hume Feldman, Adrian Melott, and Sergei Shandarin comprise the Cosmology, which attempts to understand the large-scale structure of
the Universe through computer modelling and comparisons between simulations
and the results from ongoing extragalactic surveys. Dr.
Tom Cravens and Prof. Emeritus
Tom Armstrong use NASA support and collaborations to study the plasma physics
of the solar system as represented by a mixture of cometary and planetary objects.
A key addition to the astrophysics group in the area of plasma astrophysics
is Dr. Misha
Medvedev, who joined the department as an assistant professor in
Fall 2002 and was promoted to associate professor in 2006. Expansion into new and exciting areas of astrophysical significance has been aided by the addition of theoretician Dr. Danny Marfatia within Astroparticle Physics in 2004 and the development of the interdisciplinary field of Astrobiology, specifically the impact of astrophysical phenomena on the Earth's climate, led by Dr. Adrian Melott.
