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Credit: Courtesy Physics and Astronomy
Ted Williams, professor of physics and
astronomy, and Holly Smith, executive
dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences-New
Brunswick, joined university and
government dignitaries at the Southern
African Large Telescope dedication.
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The Southern African Large Telescope, or SALT – one of the world’s largest telescopes – is a milestone for South Africa’s scientific community, placing that country among an elite group to host pioneering astronomy research.
For astronomy professor Ted Williams and his Rutgers colleagues who attended the SALT dedication ceremony Nov. 10, the SALT initiative marks the beginning of great things to come for their department and the university. “Being a partner in SALT will catapult Rutgers into the front ranks of research and teaching in astronomy,” Williams predicted. “We will be recognized as one of the world’s leading institutions.”
Williams makes this bold claim with a confidence based on 35 years of research experience, collaborations with leading astronomical institutions and a dedication to the field that has taken him to the world’s great observatories in California, Hawaii and Chile.
In September, Rutgers and the 10 other SALT partners released the telescope’s first images – the astronomical equivalent of a ribbon cutting ceremony. The pictures show newly born stars among brilliantly glowing gas clouds, clusters of stars more than twice the age of the sun and another galaxy similar to the Milky Way.
This month’s dedication gave the partners’ leaders a chance to behold their collective $20 million investment – completed on time and within budget – and to recognize private donors. At Rutgers, private contributions accounted for a quarter of the university’s initial investment. The dedication also gave partners a chance to plan ongoing collaborations, including review of a proposal to build a SALT twin to meet the astronomical profession’s need for more windows on the sky.
Rutgers holds a 10 percent partnership in SALT, having contributed $2.4 million toward construction and an additional $1 million for operations during the first 10 years. Rutgers and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, another SALT partner, also built a sophisticated instrument package for the telescope, which all the partners will be able to use. In 1999, Rutgers became the first institutional partner to join the National Research Foundation of South Africa in the SALT project. Williams represents Rutgers on SALT’s board of directors.
“Astronomy has had a long history of private observing,” Williams said. “For years, you had to go to schools that owned and operated their own observatories, such as Cal Tech or Harvard, if you wanted to pursue a career in this field.” Things started to change in the 1950s, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) began funding national observatories for universities without their own facilities. This allowed schools like Rutgers to build respectable graduate programs in astronomy.
“The NSF’s idea worked well, but perhaps too well,” said Williams. “Soon there were many schools and researchers competing for resources.” As a result, the national observatories became selective in parceling out viewing time to experienced researchers, leaving no opportunities for the next generation to practice on the latest and greatest instruments.
Schools that couldn’t afford observatories banded together to build new ones, which guaranteed them shares of viewing time. Rutgers is now in such a position with SALT – making the astronomy department a draw for new talent and research grants. “Our investment guarantees us 10 percent of SALT’s observing time,” Williams said. “Right now, we’re trying to fill up our time share; but with all our professors and several graduate students proposing studies, I don’t think we’ll have that problem for long.”
Though Williams finds the 20-hour flights to Cape Town exhausting, he enjoys reaching his destination. The South African Astronomical Observatory’s headquarters in Cape Town houses a collection of historical telescopes and a two-story library with glass bookshelves and British naval artifacts. “It feels just like academic libraries of 50 years ago,” he said.
But even beyond his study of astronomy, Williams views Rutgers’ involvement in SALT as a significant step. “Rutgers had earlier established programs in fields such as business and education in the newly democratic South Africa, so adding a technical program was a logical fit,” he said. “Technical development is a keystone to expanding South Africa’s economy and political stature, and the observatory, with our contribution, will provide enriching educational and employment opportunities for the country’s citizens.”
SALT is located 220 miles inland from Cape Town on a 5,000-foot-high plateau, far away from city lights and on the edge of a desert, ensuring dark, dry nights for capturing crystal-clear images. With its 36-foot (11-meter) mirror, SALT is able to detect objects as faint as a candle flame on the moon. Its location in the southern hemisphere provides a better view of our Milky Way galaxy and other objects of interest to Rutgers astronomers. And its location in Africa complements observatories in South America and Australia, so that somewhere on earth there will always be a telescope trained on the southern night sky. This allows 24-hour views of time-variable events, such as a binary star eclipse or supernova explosion.
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