Focus On: TMT’s Galaxy Hunter
  Gary Sanders

Astronomy made the news this month, big time. Pluto in the news. And, oh, there is that TIME magazine cover. TIME magazine. The Big Time! A banner headline that announces "How The Stars Were Born." And Caltech and TMT’s Richard Ellis stares out of page 46, hunting galaxies, and on page 51, pointing the way to his student, Dan Stark, in the Keck Observatory control room.

Across the globe, front pages cried out about the demotion of Pluto. Small children in classrooms far and wide were a bit shaken. The 9 planets that they had carefully learned, each with its size and distance and color and patterns and rings and moons, were now a broken family. A broken family! Confidence shaken. Really most disturbing! The stuff of popular headlines and public attention. Jay Leno, Stephen Colbert and the other nightly pundits remark. The morphology of space, constant like the ark of astronomy’s covenant, is changed by a committee debating definitions.

Astronomers meet periodically in global conferences. No meeting is more elevated than the International Astronomical Union’s General Assembly. General Assembly: the title invokes the gravitas of the United Nations. Delegates journey every few years to one place or another, representing their national astronomical society. These august convocations debate great things in astronomy. This year it was held in Prague. And the controversy of newly discovered planets in our solar system and what to name them and whether they really are planets, arrived at this meeting. Where else could such an important and weighty question as names and classifications be debated but at this College of Astronomy’s Cardinals?

But TIME magazine had it right. They stepped past this visible controversy, though prominent in the public mind, and asked a real burning question at the heart of astronomical pursuits: How are stars born? Where did the Universe’s very first light come from? What happened when the Big Bang gave way to a black cosmos, the so-called Dark Ages, and then the light returned? The article begins on page 42 with the proclamation of Genesis: Let There Be Light.

There is the visage of Richard Ellis, TMT Board Member, member of our Science Advisory Committee, Steele Professor of Astronomy at TMT-partner Caltech, peeking over the label “The Galaxy Hunter,” like a modern-day ‘Kilroy Was Here’. Richard Ellis Was Here. A notable quote in the article from a peer describes Richard’s passion for peering into the cosmic fog as it burns away: “It’s always great fun to see the latest Richard Ellis entry in the Most-Distant-Object sweepstakes.”

Using the giant telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory, the light gathered in the 10-meter mirror enables Richard and student to spy upon the most distant galaxies. “Most distant” means oldest in the rushing-away universe.

The article describes a night of varying seeing conditions and some technical fumbles using the giant telescope. Three of six planned galaxy encounters are accomplished. The article makes it clear that Ellis and Stark are just enjoying the first glimpse of this cosmic archaeology. The real revelation, TIME reporter Michael D. Lemonick says, will come after another generation of “monster” telescopes arrives. TIME calls these new eyes “monsters.” Richard Ellis wants to best his own record with the monster TMT. And he dedicates similar passion to realizing TMT.

If Richard’s name seems familiar to you as a reader of this Newscast, that is because he authored the Science Nugget in our July issue. Not surprisingly, it was about hunting cosmic reionization, the first light and the oldest galaxies.

Bravo TIME magazine for reaching around the fun of Pluto’s reclassification to one of the most remarkable frontiers in astronomy. A frontier for monster TMT.

And wait ‘til you see the cool diffraction-limited images that TMT will collect observing Pluto.