Even if the average person didn’t understand exactly what Dr.
Dan Reichart said Thursday evening in a presentation, they can
surely appreciate the results.
Two months ago, Reichart and an undergraduate student from
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discovered the most
distant explosion in the universe. A star exploded 12.8 billion
years ago, and in September, its light reached the earth.
At the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, Reichart presented
for a crowd in the O’Kain Auditorium, “From Bradford to the
Discovery of the Most Distant Explosion in the Universe: My First
15 years as an Astronomer.”
Born in Warren and growing up in Bradford, Reichart, an
assistant professor of physics and astronomy at UNC, began his talk
with appreciation to three of his former Bradford Area High School
teachers including Diane Meier, Donald Graybill, and Randy
Bish.
“I received a truly excellent education at Bradford High
School,” he said. “When I was in high school, I thought of going to
law school, but they talked me out of that lucrative business and
pushed science instead.”
Reichart explained Meier was his math teacher while Graybill was
his physics teacher and Bish was the study hall teacher who used to
ask Reichart to help him with experiments, including attempting to
get lightening bolts on film – which apparently lead to a small
amount of pain for Reichart – instead of letting him stay in study
hall.
Jokes aside, Reichart went on to explain that a trip that Dr.
Dan Fellows, former astronomy teacher at Pitt-Bradford, took him on
as a Bridges student studying at Pitt-Bradford while in high
school, was the reason he became so excited in observing
explosions.
“I was very lucky to go,” explained Reichart. “I had a really
exciting experience. I worked with professionals. It’s what got me
hooked into what I do now – chasing explosions.”
He told a story of how one night when he was in Green Bank,
W.Va., with a group from Pitt-Bradford, he was awakened by another
student. They were in a location that allows the students to
conduct educational research in radio astronomy, and the other
student told him that he just witnessed what he believed was an
enormous bolt of radio waves in space.
After looking through charts and studying the possibility of an
explosion of a Red Giant star, the students soon discovered that it
was a false alarm. This did not deter Reichart, however, but
encouraged him to look into the possibility of studying these types
of explosions further.
“It got me really excited about the chase,” he said.
He described a brief history of the use of satellites and the
beginnings of the discovery of astronomical bursts, and what they
really were.
Reichart said once they realized they were looking at something
outside of our own galaxy, in bursts that had been detected over
time, they knew that they had to be explosions of massive
stars.
The one recorded in September in particular was one – which
means a star at least 100 times the size of the sun.
He said the star will burn through its fuel through nuclear
fusion leaving a core of iron which eventually collapses creating a
black hole and death of the star. While it rotates, said Reichart,
it forms a disc that absorbs energy which will eventually have to
“take off” and “plow out of the star into space,” and if that jet
is pointing toward earth, we will see it.
At about this point, Reichart asks the audience, “Are you with
me?” In response, nervous giggles from some and excited nods from
others.
In order to see these types of explosions, continued Reichart,
several filters must be used simultaneously, and up until recently,
there were no telescopes that were equipped to do such a thing.
At this time he is involved in a project that would result in
just that with construction occurring in Chile. But for now, he has
to wait until those telescopes are put completely together.
And even without the newer telescopes, on Sept. 4, he and Josh
Haislip detected the most distant explosion in the universe. First
detected by a NASA satellite named Swift, Reichart received a text
message on his cell phone giving him coordinates of a gamma burst
ray.
Locating the object by remote access using SOAR, or the Southern
Observatory for Astrophysical Research telescope in Chile, they
realized it was an object not previously archived.
While they observed it, the object faded, which was expected.
But using PROMPT, or the Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring
and Polarimetry Telescopes, they could not detect the object, which
was exactly what they wanted to happen. This meant that what they
were seeing was very distant.
Meanwhile, an infrared camera detected the afterglow and
measured the distance of the burst.
According to Reichart who talked to The Era previously, “This
burst smashes the old distance record by 500 million light
years.”
The universe is 13.7 billion years old and the recent sighting
of the explosion goes back 12.8 billion years.
“We went 94 percent of the way back,” said Reichart.
He said equipment like that which is being constructed in Chile
will help scientists learn about a time that until now very little
is known.
Reichart has received several awards including the Carl Sagan
Award for Excellence in Teaching from the University of Chicago and
the Robert J. Trumpler Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation
Research in Astronomy from the Astronomical Society of the
Pacific.
He earned his doctoral and master’s degrees in astronomy and
astrophysics, both from the University of Chicago. He earned three
bachelor’s degrees – in astronomy and astrophysics, physics, and
mathematics – and a minor in history from Pennsylvania State
University in 1996.
He lives in Durham, N.C., with his wife Kara, and son,
Johnathan. He is a son of Paul and Myra Reichart, formerly of
Bradford, who now live in Dillsburg.
