The speaker at the Bradford Area High School graduation is sure
to encourage seniors to follow their dreams, to choose careers
wisely – because as he will prove, you never know where it might
take you – maybe even to the stars.

Dr. Dan Reichart’s work lead him to a job where he would
eventually identify the oldest explosion ever observed in the
universe. It was a gamma ray burst – a light that was 12.8 billion
years old that was seen on Sept. 3, 2005. The universe is 13.7
billion years old, so that burst goes back a long time.

“We went 94 percent of the way back” said Reichart in November
during a talk he gave at the University of Pittsburgh at
Bradford.

He is an astrophysicist and assistant professor at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and one of his
students, Josh Haislip, was able to be his partner in crime in the
discovery.

In an article in the Carolina Arts and Sciences spring issue,
Reichart, a graduate of Bradford Area High School, is described as
the type of a mentor that puts students to work, not for the sake
of it, but for the learning experience of it, and due to that type
of mentoring, it really paid off for 20-year-old Haislip and other
Reichart students.

Reichart, 31, is said to enjoy his work, having once thought he
would become a lawyer until he started to take notice of
astronomy.

The article further says that because of his own mentor at
Pennsylvania State University, Reichart was able to refine his
skills and put them to practical use – something which he does with
his current students.

In November, he said a trip with Dr. Dan Fellows, a former
astronomy teacher at Pitt-Bradford, took him as a Bridges student
(studying at Pitt-Bradford while still in high school) to Green
Bank W.Va., where he had his first experience with a “false alarm”
where he and fellow students though they had witnessed the
explosion of a Red Giant star.

Even though that experience was a false alarm, Reichart was
hooked.

Today, Reichart leads groups of would-be astronomers to the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia for week-long
observations and research.

Before the discovery of the oldest explosion observed in the
universe, Reichart asked Haislip to research the Ohio State
InfraRed Imaging/Spectrometer (OSIRIS) an observing instrument
mounted on the SOAR (Southern Observatory for Astrophysical
Research) telescope in Chile.

Once Reichart was alerted about the unusual burst, he and
Haislip contacted the astronomer at SOAR. Since Haislip knew how to
use OSIRIS, he made measurements of images that were sent from
Chile while Reichart worked the numbers. The article adds that
graduate student Melissa Nysewander and other students double
checked the information and the rest is history.

The two students will be listed in the journal “Nature” as first
and second authors of the find while Reichart stays in the
background letting them have the credit.

From Penn State, Reichart finished his masters and doctorate at
the University of Chicago.

Also on his list of achievements are as research assistant in
the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State;
research and teaching assistant at the Department of Astronomy and
Astrophysics at the University of Chicago; a visiting research
associate in the Department of Physics at Carnegie Mellon
University; a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of
Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology; and assistant
professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Honors for research and teaching he has received include the
Carl Sagan Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1998 from the
University of Chicago; Nathan Sugarman Award for Excellence in
Research in 1999, also from the University of Chicago; Breakthrough
of the Year, Tenth place in 1999 in “Science Magazine;” and the
Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship from Space Telescope Science
Institute NASA in 2000-02, among others.

Reichart is also a member of the Educational Research in Radio
Astronomy (ERIRA) Program; he spent two years with the
Astrophysical Research Consortium Gamma-Ray Burst Collaboration;
the Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring and Polarimetry
Telescopes (PROMPT) Collaboration; and Follow-up Network for
Gamma-Ray Bursts (FUN GRB) Collaboration among others.

He was born in Warren but lived in Bradford and was a 1991
graduate of Bradford Area High School. He is the son of Paul and
Myra Reichart, formerly of Bradford.