News Release

CHAPEL HILL -- North Carolina students from kindergarten through graduate school will be able to use remote access technology and high-power telescopes to observe gamma-ray bursts and other astronomical phenomenon, thanks in part to a major National Science Foundation (NSF) award to an astronomer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Daniel E. Reichart, assistant professor of physics and astronomy in UNC-Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences, has received the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early career-development activities for teacher-scholars.

The CAREER award, a five-year, $490,000 grant by the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, will support Reichart’s research on gamma-ray bursts. The award also supports plans for students at UNC-Chapel Hill and at other universities and schools statewide to have remote access to high-tech telescopes in Chile.

The educational activities are made possible by existing collaborations between UNC-Chapel Hill and 11 other institutions involved in developing six NSF-funded Panchromatic Robotic Optical Monitoring and Polarimetry Telescopes (PROMPT) in Chile. Collaborators include: Appalachian State University, Elon University, Fayetteville State University, Guilford Technical Community College, N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University, UNC-Asheville, UNC-Charlotte, UNC-Greensboro, UNC-Pembroke and Western Carolina University, as well as Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.

Activities for public school students will be available through programs led by Reichart and colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known in the universe since the Big Bang, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). They come from all directions of the sky and can last from a few milliseconds to a few hundred seconds.

Scientists only recently have learned that gamma-ray bursts result when stars more than 30 times as massive as the sun reach the end of their lives and collapse to form black holes, said Reichart.

"Gamma-ray bursts are expected to be the next great probe of the early universe, allowing astronomers to reach back in time roughly three times closer to the Big Bang than has been achieved to date," Reichart said.

More accurate observations of gamma-ray bursts have been possible since November 2004, when NASA launched its high-tech Swift satellite, which finds the gamma-ray bursts. Reichart and colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill and other partner universities have been building and organizing both small robotic telescopes and large human-controlled telescopes in Chile and South Africa to observe gamma-ray bursts. In addition to the PROMPT system near completion in Chile, UNC-Chapel Hill scientists are involved in the new Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope that opened there last year and are collaborating on the development of a large telescope in South Africa.

UNC-Chapel Hill also has access to powerful robotic telescopes at Tenagra Observatories Ltd. in southern Arizona and leads the Follow-Up Network for Gamma-Ray Bursts (know as the FUN GRB Collaboration), a large telescope collaboration organized to maximize observations of gamma-ray bursts found by the Swift satellite.

Remote access technology on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus will make it possible for students at all of the PROMPT partner institutions, as well as public school students visiting UNC-Chapel Hill’s Morehead Center, to look through these high-tech telescopes.

"We are planning to establish a summer internship program that will bring undergraduates from other PROMPT collaboration institutions to Chapel Hill to work with Morehead Observatory and specialized instrumentation and to gain large telescope observing experience that they might not otherwise get, by remotely chasing gamma-ray bursts through telescopes in Chile and South Africa," Reichart said.

Students also would attend a weeklong summer program in Educational Research in Radio Astronomy that Reichart established at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., in 1992.

Last fall, a group of UNC-Chapel Hill undergraduates and one graduate student spent the semester in Chile working directly on the PROMPT and SOAR telescopes, through a Burch Field Research Seminar led by astronomers Drs. Wayne Christiansen and Gerald Cecil. Burch seminars, funded by a gift from alumnus Lucius Burch III, allow UNC-Chapel Hill faculty to take small groups of undergraduates to remote locations nationwide and abroad for special research projects.

- 30 -

Note: Contact Reichart at (919) 962-5310 or reichart@email.unc.edu. A photo of Reichart is at www.unc.edu/news/pics/faculty/reichart_dan.jpg

News Services contact: Deb Saine, (919) 962-8415 or deborah_saine@unc.edu