| Project
Manager's Corner: A Whole Lot of Things Going On Gary H. Sanders, TMT Project Manager There are a whole lot of things going on. Every day
the pace is picking up as TMT enters the final design phase and
as we begin to plan the initiation of construction. The number
of vendor meetings, bidding meetings, design review meetings and
meetings with hosts of potential sites has reached a cadence where
almost every day something significant is happening. TMT's
Inagural Exhibit at AAS
The booth production team included Sandra Dawson (logistics), David Silva (overall booth and brochure design and production), Lennon Rodgers (graphics and animation), and Jerry Nelson (bookmarks) with assistance from Puragra (Raja) Guhathakurta. Kim Parrish of Odyssey Exhibits produced the final booth design as well as the booth itself. We learned a lot from this first foray into exhibits and look forward to an even better display next time. See you at the January 2009 AAS meeting in Long Beach!Science
Nugget—Understanding the Dynamics of Galaxy Formation in
the Early Universe
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Interview Previous Issues View the TMT Newscast Archive. |
The inaugural TMT exhibit at the winter meeting of the American
Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas was a great success. Hundreds
of people visited our booth, picked up a bookmark and/or brochure,
and watched the TMT fly-through video. Visitors also had a chance
to chat with TMT scientists and engineers including George Angeli,
Puragra (Raja) Guhathakurta, Jerry Nelson, Reed Riddle, David Silva,
and Chuck Steidel. Sandra Dawson, our communications officer, was
also present for the entire meeting.
In the local universe, we see a familiar population of galaxies:
dwarfs, spirals and ellipticals whose structures
have shaped our understanding of morphological diversity. In
contrast to our knowledge of the present-day
structure and distribution of these galaxies however, our knowledge
of their formation mechanisms is
rudimentary. Observations of galaxies at higher redshifts (i.e.
at earlier times in the history of the universe)
indicate that these galaxies began as blobby, highly irregular
clumps of star formation (Fig. 1) quite dissimilar to
their present-day descendants. Understanding the formation of
these early, rapidly star-forming galaxies and their subsequent
evolution into the local galaxy population is one of the most
significant challenges to the current generation of astronomers
in the effort to determine how, when, and why the galactic building
blocks of the visible universe formed.
Q & A
with Dave Silva 