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News Tip

 


December 3, 1999

For more information on these science news and feature story tips, please contact the public information officer at the end of each item at (703) 292-8070. Editor: Cheryl Dybas

Student Scores High in Supernovae Search

A team of astrophysicists supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) spotted 20 supernovae this November, partly due to a student’s hard work.

Alicia Soderberg, a physics and math major at Bates College in Maine, joined the team for its recent search as part of an NSF program that provides undergraduates with hands-on research experience. Using the prominent Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii, she personally identified nine of the 20 new supernovae, including the most distant one found to date.

"It’s thrilling to shout across the room 'I’ve got one!' when you spot the first supernova during an observing run," says Soderberg. "No classroom experience could have prepared me for the excitement of doing hands-on astronomy with some of the world’s best."

The team launched its search for supernovae -- bright, dying stars located billions of light years from Earth -- in the hope that measuring the light from these stars can help determine the change in the rate of expansion of the universe. Preliminary results imply that the universe is accelerating, not slowing down. NSF’s Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory in Chile has also been used in the search. [Amber Jones]

For more information, see: http://www-cfa.harvard.edu/cfa/oir/Research/supernova/HighZ.html

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Geologists Brave "Roaring 40s" to Study Mysteries of Mid-Ocean Ridge

One of the most perplexing segments of the global mid-ocean ridge spreading system is currently being investigated by researchers aboard the scientific drillship JOIDES Resolution. The scientists hope to determine the ridge segment's mantle history. The segment is located south of Australia near where the Pacific and Indian Oceans meet, in a region known to mariners as the "Roaring 40s" for the extreme and dangerous sea conditions at this latitude. The research is being conducted under the aegis of the international Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), and is funded in large part by the National Science Foundation.

Spreading centers are unique locations on Earth where new ocean floor (crust) is continuously formed, explains David Christie of Oregon State University, co-chief scientist of the expedition. Typically, spreading centers rise above the surrounding seafloor to form continuous ridges. But the seafloor in the current study area changes dramatically over short distances, from smooth surfaces to very rough terrain. Geologists aboard the JOIDES Resolution believe that this change in seafloor terrain represents a boundary that has formed from converging pools of magma, molten material located deep in the Earth at the lower mantle. This narrow boundary, dubbed the Australian-Antarctic Discordance, stretches along the ridge axis between Australia and Antarctica.

The shipboard science team hopes to determine the mantle migration history beneath the Pacific Plate, one of Earth's tectonic plates, over the past 30 million years, explains Bruce Malfait, director of ODP at NSF. Because lavas that erupted from Indian Ocean spreading centers are chemically distinct from those of the Pacific Ocean, scientists can "fingerprint" the origin of the rocks drilled and sampled to better understand this unusual boundary between Pacific and Indian Ocean mantle. [Cheryl Dybas]

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Teachers Key to Nation's Future, Says Colwell

Speaking to a group of teachers in West Virginia last month, NSF director Rita Colwell connected education quality to economic growth as the nation moves into an economy based on knowledge and ideas. Teacher training and development are more important than ever, and NSF is "thinking big" in this area, she said.

"A 21st century workforce must be taught and trained by teachers with 21st century skills. Anything less inhibits the nation’s ability to compete and prosper. Anything less imperils our children and their children," said Colwell. NSF’s teacher training programs, including the new graduate teaching fellows, reach more than 95,000 future teachers each year, she said. This will help address the estimated need -- based on NSF and Department of Education projections -- for more than 200,000 math and science teachers by the year 2006. [Mary Hanson]

For Colwell speeches on-line, see: http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/forum/colwell/start.htm

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