American astrophysicist working with BU profs

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This article was published 13/06/2015 (3971 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They had stars in their eyes in the astronomy department at Brandon University this week when a superstar American astrophysicist paid a visit to campus.

Saul Adelman, a professor at South Carolina’s military college, The Citadel, spent the last few days working with his friend and collaborator, BU professor and former science dean Austin Gulliver.

Adelman is a distinguished scholar, having published more than 350 papers, and is currently a guest investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope along with Gulliver.

The two have worked together for more than 20 years and welcomed the opportunity to work together in one place.

“(Working together this week) has been tiring. It’s very useful. It’s intellectually stimulating. We see how things are falling together, coming together,” Adelman said.

They are currently collaborating on a project studying stars that are two and three times as massive as the sun.

“Our current major project, the theme is trying to improve the analysis of stellar of the chemical abundances in stars. And once we can do that, we are working on normal stars, then we can look at stars with more peculiar abundances,” he said.

Adelman and Gulliver are also working with Graham Hill, a retired professor in New Zealand. The three have been talking to each other all week over the phone and through emails.

The computer they all work on is in Brandon. Hill can connect to it from New Zealand and he normally starts his workday as Adelman and Gulliver are finishing theirs.

They have been collecting data from three different locations in order to analyze the stars in the universe. The ground base data that they are collecting is the strongest ground base data that has ever been collected.

“(The research) will go on forever,” Gulliver said. “Someone will eventually take over as legacy on the work that we’re doing. So there’s never a foreseeable end.”

Unfortunately, the group is finding funding for the project is now hard to come by. Gulliver used to receive funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

“That funding is no longer being received because of certain change in policy, which in my opinion disadvantaged small universities,” Gulliver said.

This lack of funding is part of the reason that Adelman travels to Brandon, having been here five previous times. He receives funding from his own university and through the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Getting funding for Hill is difficult now because he is retired. The three scientists sometimes have to put their own money into the project.

Next year, Gulliver and Adelman are planning to get together again. They would like to have Hill there, too, as it has been many years since they have all been together in one place.

However, this will all depend on whether they can co-ordinate their schedules.

» arobinson@brandonsun.com

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