Dr. Gordon Richards, a professor of Astrophysics, received the Sloan Research Fellowship Award in 2007. The Sloan Research Fellowships are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. A total of 118 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.
Tell me about what you do.
Richards: Mostly I do quasars stuff. A quasar is a black hole in the center of the galaxy. All massive galaxies have a black hole in the center. When things fall into this black hole it actually shines very brightly. However, the matter doesn’t actually fall into the black hole. There’s a traffic jam trying to get in the black hole. It forms this material spiraling in and rubs back and forth, making friction. It heats up. People in the late 60s and early 70s would find these objects that looked like stars, but were really bright. They realized that they were very distant. They must be very luminous. They look bright to you here, but if you were only the sun’s distance from them they would be astoundingly bright. They didn’t know what they were. We’ve come to realize that they were matter being accreted on this black hole in the center of the galaxy. It’s so bright that you don’t even see the rest of the galaxy. It completely warps the light from it. You’re just seeing the light coming from it.
The thing that most galaxies have is black holes. There’s a period of time when stuff is falling into them and they sort of run out of fuel and die and turn into a normal galaxy that we would see today. Maybe in about 10 million years, you would see the light from the object and then it’ll run out of fuel and turn off. Even the Milky Way has a black hole in the center of it that stuff is being dumped onto. It’s a huge black hole in the center of the galaxy and it’s still not big enough compared with most things. I’m interested in studying the actual physics that’s going on of this matter falling into this black hole in the center of these galaxies. You have these huge, bright flashlights spread throughout the universe and they are great signposts for other science. They are lighting up other galaxies along the line of sight. You can study the galaxies along the line of sight that were too dim to see otherwise. But you can actually study their properties because there’s this light source behind them. It also tells you a lot about how the galaxy is formed in the first place. Even something as simple as counting the number of quasars you see tells you a lot of how galaxies formed. I use quasars as tools to do science or trying to study them themselves.
Tell me about the work for which you received the Sloan Research Fellowship Award.
Richards: I work on the Sloan Digital Sky survey, which is the project that maps a quarter of the sky with a digital camera. When you go out and just look at the sky with your eyes you’re not seeing most of what’s there. Your eyes aren’t very sensitive. We want to see objects that are dimmer and further away. Objects that already tend to be dim are the ones that are further back in time. Those are the interesting ones. We look at objects that are very different. You’re seeing the light from them as they looked billions of years ago.
What is your reaction to receiving the Sloan Research Fellowship Award?
Richards: Good. It’s very exciting. I think that some sciences usually used to slowly plow along, not really knowing if [they’re] accomplishing something. This award shows that you’re excited about what you’re doing. It’s hard to know for sure if anybody else cares. It’s gratifying to have colleagues who are like, “He’s doing a great job.”
Can you explain your role as “Builder” in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey?
Richards: Astronomy is moving in a different way these days. It used to be that you get together with your colleagues and write a paper on whatever you were thinking about. Now it’s gotten to the point where projects actually move forward and science has gotten so big that you can’t do that with one or two or three people. It takes 100 people, 10 institutions or more, and hundreds of millions of dollars. The problem for scientists is they spend a lot of their time not doing science. They’re doing intro-structure type work. What Sloan decided to do was acknowledge the work that young people were putting into building the project and giving up time to do science. The builders of the project have the right to ask to be on the science papers that are used in the system as payment for work they have done along the way. Someone else wouldn’t have been able to write the science paper if you hadn’t done the work that you had done to make the project as a whole work. You gave up your time to do some science so it’s a payback.
This is your first faculty teaching position. How do you like it?
Richards: So far so good. It’s fun to work with students. It’s hard. It’s a lot of work. When I was a student, I remember thinking that most of my courses weren’t that good. You wonder how people don’t do better. Then you are given the task of doing and it, and you realize fairly quickly how it is--it can be that hard. Teaching is your primary responsibility but they expect you to do research and contribute to literature and go to conferences. It’s like three full time jobs squeezed into one. You’re supposed to teach this class and be innovative and get people interested. It’s work. Most of us have already gone through traditional lecture format in classes. We’re turning away from that, especially in the Intro to Astronomy courses. The classes you took are all traditional lecture format, kind of boring, with 300 people sitting in the back of the room, people sleeping. Your knee-jerk reaction is to do the same thing. What you really want to be is more innovative with your teaching, but you need someone to help you and tell you what works and what doesn’t work.
What do you plan to bring to Drexel?
Richards: The main thing I bring is a different niche of science. I do quasar work that is different from what people do here. As a faculty member, you want to be able to talk to other people about your science. From the university’s point of view, they want people who don’t do the same thing as everybody else because that means that they can apply for different types of grant money and their students will have different projects to work on. I do different work than the other people in the group do. It’s nice when you expand your horizons a bit.
How do you plan on further developing the Astrophysics area of this department?
Richards: We’re involved in the Sloan Digital Sky survey, which is one of the bigger projects in the astronomy field today. It’s a huge 500-pound gorilla. We’re in the 2nd phase of that project. At the end of the month, we’re hosting the collaboration meeting that gets held every six months to a year here at Drexel. It’s a big group of people that used to be at ten institutes, but now is about 20 institutions. Once or twice a year one of the institutions says, “Everyone come over here, and we’ll talk about the things we need to talk about.” It’s usually one of the newer institutions. I just came here and asked if Drexel wanted to host a meeting and they agreed. At this meeting, we’re going to talk about what we want to do in coming years. Money for the current project runs out in 2008, and we want to use the same facilities. There’s a telescope in New Mexico. It’s a perfectly fine telescope and there’s no reason we can’t keep using it. We’re applying for funds to keep it running for another five years and do the next generation of things. There are talks about trying to look for planets and measure the scale of the universe. There are about five different projects going on.
How has Drexel helped contribute to your research? Has it opened any doors for you?
Richards: I came to a place that doesn’t have an astro group of 15 but of four. One of the things you worry about is if people are going to take you seriously. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. People are sick of seeing Princeton and all these places that claim to have a monopoly on everything. We’re getting a little more respect because people are spreading out and going to smaller places to spread the wealth and get the ideas out there. We’re having a bigger, more diverse field as opposed to a small group of elite people. It’s good for the field, astronomy education, and physics in general. We have more people doing cutting edge astrophysics at a large number of institutions and teaching those astro classes. A lot of times someone who teaches an astro class isn’t doing current research so you can’t squeeze in a little tidbit on what new things are going on. You have to wait for it to come out instead of talking about what you did at a conference you just came back from. We are a level above the undergrads and grad students in some cases. I think it’s good to show people that you’re excited about the current research that’s going on and it’s not a dead field. It’s a field that’s rapidly evolving.
How has Drexel furthered your career?
Richards: I’ve only been here for about nine months. It’s a smaller place. The physics department is fairly big with about 22 [faculty members], but the astrophysics department is about four teaching faculty. That’s starting to be more and more common in the field. It used to be if you wanted to do world-class astrophysics you were either at Caltech, Princeton, or Harvard. There were maybe 10 places. Now with more national facilities and Hubble space telescopes, anybody can apply for time. If you get time on it, they give you money to analyze the data. You can support yourself. You don’t have to be at Princeton or Caltech to do this kind of thing. There are more and more smaller groups that are working on this real science. I would put Drexel in this category -- a place that is growing and is doing good work that they wouldn’t have been able to do 20 years ago because only the big powers were able to.
What inspired you to go into this field?
Richards: I was going to be a chemistry major when I was an undergrad. To be honest, I had Monday, Wednesday and Friday classes at 8:30. That just wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t discover coffee until senior year. Maybe if I discovered coffee freshman year I would have been a chemist. I migrated towards physics for various reasons. When I was in physics I realized that most of the questions in physics that were interesting to me were in astrophysics. Most of the stuff we do in astrophysics we can’t do in some laboratory. It’s not like you had a lab down the hall and you go do some experiment. The universe is your laboratory because you can’t build billion degree things that are significantly larger than the earth. It got to be fun and the people I was working with were really good. As an undergrad, I got into research projects right away. It’s a small field and even though I was the most junior person around, they treated me as a colleague. I had opinions that they respected whether I knew anything or not. It wasn’t relevant. I got involved in research fast. It has much less emphasis on classes and things like that. This works with Drexel. With the co-op program, we see that it’s good to get your hands dirty with real stuff instead of teaching theoretically that this is how you would apply your skills that you learn in college.
Since your laboratory is millions of miles away, how do you try to figure that stuff out?
Richards: We do population analysis. You count how many quasars are of a certain brightness or at a certain distance or have a certain color. Some are bluer than others. We find the objects then we can pass the light from them through a prism and break the white light down into different color components. Instead of seeing an object of a certain brightness, you find red wavelengths are more bright and blue wavelengths are less bright. You’ll find places where light is missing and we learn things from them. We know what kind of atoms form what. We’re basically doing cosmo-chemistry in some sense.
What is the Constellation-X mission, and can you explain your role in it?
Richards: There are currently three great observatories. There’s a Hubble space telescope, the infrared satellite, and the x-ray satellite. They have all been operating for a number of years now. They’re getting old and it’s time to replace them. The Hubble space telescope will be replaced in about 2013. One of the proposed next big missions is called Constellation-X. It’s the next generation of x-ray telescopes. There are tons of little satellites that NASA flies all the time as well as two or three billion dollar class instruments that they put up from time to time. Constellation-X is not the successor; it’s the next big telescope. It’s under review right now. They are trying to decide between a bunch of different projects, which one they are going to do next because we don’t have enough money to do them all. I chair one of the panels that is charged with telling people what such a facility would do that’s interesting. Part of it is to start planning for the mission and the other is to be cheerleaders for it. We’re competing with four other missions. We want to be the first mission because if you’re the 2nd mission on the current NASA budget, it’s so far in the future that you lose the expertise. The people who know how to build x-ray telescopes in space would have all retired by then. There will be no next generation of people coming up that know how to do it because there’s no project for them to work on. It’s already aimed at 2018, which is part of the reason that I’m involved. Which is what I’m a little insulted by. They called me asking me if I wanted to chair this panel. Part of the reason is because I’m going to be alive in 2018. Whereas, it’s not so clear about other people.
Future plans?
Richards: I’m looking forward to seeing us getting involved in a new generation of projects. More of a long term project is to redo the Sloan Sky Survey. Right now it takes five years to scan a quarter of the sky. This new project will redo the Sloan Survey more often with a bigger telescope. We won’t have a static picture of the universe, but a picture of how the universe is changing in time. Looking at stars and quasars going through their life cycles. That’ll be a lot of exciting science. We want to take pictures of the sky every couple of days and find something totally different than you would learn just taking a still photo. Those are the things I’m going to get involved with in the near future.
Jamie Juliano contributed to this interview.