Dear Friends of Ohio State Astronomy and Astrophysics,

At the end of June, I finished my second term and 8th year as chair of the Ohio State Astronomy Department. I am excited about becoming a "normal" faculty member again, and I'm delighted to be passing the department chair torch to Todd Thompson, the Allan Markowitz Chair of Astronomy, who I helped recruit to Ohio State nearly two decades ago.

Of the many (many, many, ...) jobs of the department chair, one of the most enjoyable has been writing annual news updates for FOSAA on behalf of the Ohio State Department of Astronomy and the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP). My last update for June 2024 is below. Since brevity is still outside my skill set, the summary is: "We are doing lots of great science; our faculty, staff, postdocs, and students are doing spectacular, award-winning work; and we are really, really grateful for your support."

And there was an eclipse.

Research

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration released a big splash of papers this spring, with cosmological analyses of its first year of survey data. (The project is now mid-way through its five years of observing, with a five-year extension in the works.) Based on maps of more than 5 million galaxies and quasars, these papers present the most precise measurements ever made of the expansion of the cosmos over the past 10 billion years. They provide a tantalizing hint (but only a hint) that the "dark energy" driving accelerated cosmic expansion may be evolving in time, and thus more complex than the space-filling, constant energy first suggested by Albert Einstein more than a century ago. OSU scientists, led by Paul Martini, Klaus Honscheid, and Ashley Ross, have played a central role in DESI since its early days, including much of the design and construction of the instrument itself, and many OSU students and postdocs contributed to these first results. You can read more about the DESI findings in this press release: https://physics.osu.edu/news/first-year-desi-results-unveil-new-clues-about-dark-energy

In last year's update, I mentioned the large award of observing time on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to the PHANGS collaboration, an international team co-led by Professor Adam Leroy, which studies the stars and interstellar gas of nearby galaxies in unprecedented detail using the world's most powerful telescopes. In February the PHANGS team published more than 20 papers presenting the first results from these JWST images. You can see some of those images in the NASA press release here. In December, Professor Leroy gave a Science Sundays lecture on "The Birth and Death of Stars in Galaxies". You can find a video of that talk and other Science Sundays lectures here.

In about three years, JWST will be joined by NASA's next Great Observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. In 2023 NASA selected the "project infrastructure teams" to develop the critical tools for Roman's major surveys. Professor Scott Gaudi leads the team for the galactic bulge survey, which will discover thousands of planets through gravitational microlensing. Professors Chris Hirata and David Weinberg have leading roles in the team designing the large area cosmology survey, which will map the distribution of dark matter with weak gravitational lensing. Each team is carrying out a five-year, multi-million dollar effort that will continue through the first analyses of Roman data.

These are just a few highlights from the hundreds of articles published by OSU astronomers over the last year. ASAS-SN continues to survey the entire sky, every night, discovering supernovae, stars shredded by supermassive black holes, and many varieties of cosmic weirdness. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey measures the spectra of thousands of stars and galaxies every night, using telescopes in New Mexico and Chile equipped with the robotic fiber positioner arrays built in OSU's Imaging Sciences Laboratory (ISL). The ISL's next project, the iLocater spectrograph for the Large Binocular Telescope, reminds us of its progress every day at astro coffee, as we hear the squeaks of its vacuum pump through the wall of our conference room.

Faculty

Professors Kaeli Hughes and Pierre Heidmann joined the physics department in 2023, building CCAPP's research groups in experimental searches for high-energy neutrinos and theoretical studies of quantum black holes. Yuan-Sen Ting, one of the leading young researchers at the interface of astronomy and AI, will join the astronomy department faculty this fall. Exoplanet specialist Ji Wang was promoted to tenure, one of the biggest milestones in an academic career.

Professor Smita Mathur received the OSU Distinguished Scholar Award, recognizing her pioneering discoveries of the hot gaseous halos surrounding the Milky Way and other galaxies. Over a ten-year span, about two percent of Ohio State's professors earned the Distinguished Scholar Award. Amazingly, eight of the Astronomy Department's 19 faculty have won this award --- and there will be more in the years ahead! Professor Scott Gaudi was named a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society, one of 21 astronomers elected from institutions across North America. Professor John Beacom received the OSU Community Engaged Scholar Award for his work with SciAccess. In April I had the honor of attending my first National Academy of Sciences meeting, following my election last year. All of the new inductees signed our names in a giant book; supposedly the first signature in this register is Abraham Lincoln, who established the National Academy in 1863, but we weren't allowed to flip to the front page to verify this hypothesis.

Jennifer Johnson was named the Henry L. Cox Professor of Astronomy. The Cox Professorship rotates between the astronomy and physics departments every five years (the previous holder was John Beacom). Endowed faculty positions --- the Cox Professorship, the Markowitz Chair, the Thomas Jefferson Chair, and the Ohio Eminent Scholar Chair --- are a critical source of support for our scientific endeavors. They have been especially valuable in helping CCAPP and OSU Astronomy to establish a world-class postdoctoral scholar program.

Undergraduates

Over the past decade, the number of OSU's undergraduate astronomy majors has tripled, and we are now #5 in the nation as a source of newly minted astronomy baccalaureates. Many people deserve kudos for the leaps in our undergraduate program, including Director of Undergraduate Studies Dr. Wayne Schlingman, who won the OSU Community Engaged Practitioner Award in 2023, advisor David Zach, who won the University Outstanding Advising Award in 2024, and longtime faculty stalwarts Don Terndrup and Paul Martini, who have introduced new courses, mentored research students, and built the undergraduate community over many years. We are delighted this year to welcome Dr. Lindsay Westraadt to our department in the newly created position of Undergraduate Program Specialist.

This year's graduating class included 31 astronomy and astrophysics majors and 8 astronomy minors. Eight students completed our new certificate in planetary science, developed jointly by the Department of Astronomy and the School of Earth Sciences. An amazing 16 of our graduates are going on to Ph.D. programs in astronomy, astrophysics, planetary science, physics, and applied physics. Two of them were awarded graduate research fellowships from the National Science Foundation, and a third was awarded an honorable mention in this national competition. This is a class that entered OSU at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, so they have persevered through more than the usual challenges of college life.

Graduate Students and Postdocs

Many of Ohio State's Ph.D. alumni are now leading astronomers at institutions around the world. The first step for those continuing in an academic career is usually a postdoctoral research position. Three of this year's graduating students are going to postdoctoral positions at Johns Hopkins University, University of Pittsburgh, and the Carnegie Institution for Science, and a fourth is going directly to a faculty position at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Ph.D. grad Kiersten Boley and recent PhD alumna Sanskriti Das were both awarded 3-year NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowships, the most prestigious national fellowships in the U.S. This year I chaired the international committee of astronomers that whittled the list of over 500 applicants down to 24 Hubble Fellows, so I saw first hand just how stiff this competition is. CCAPP postdoc Andrei Cuceu was awarded a Hubble Fellowship in 2023.

Our current graduate students also did spectacularly well in national fellowship competitions: three were awarded NSF graduate fellowships, one an NSF honorable mention, and one a NASA FINESST fellowship. We have five incoming graduate students next year, including two more NSF graduate fellows.

Next year we will have six incoming postdoctoral researchers, a new record for us, working on topics ranging from planetary microlensing to stellar seismology to galactic archaeology to the most distant quasars. Thanks partly to a generous alumni donation, this year we were able to offer an astronomy department Buckeye Prize Postdoctoral Fellowship, open to all fields of astronomy. Recipient Lucy Lu, who recently completed her Ph.D. at Columbia, studies stellar ages and the history of the Milky Way, and she was also selected as a 2024 OSU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow.

Outreach

Thanks partly to a favorable alignment of sun and moon, this was our biggest year ever in astronomy outreach. Wayne Schlingman and his crew did an unfathomable number of events for an unfathomable number of people, in the Slettebak Planetarium, local schools and libraries, alumni gatherings in Cleveland and Dallas, and more. We gave away 60,000 pairs of eclipse glasses.

With covid restrictions receding at last, we were also glad to get back to full speed in planetarium shows, with lots of support from our graduate student planetarium stars. Undergraduate alum Caitlin O'Brien, who won the $50,000 Buckeye Accelerator Prize in 2023 for her Starry Night project using a portable planetarium to serve under-resourced communities in Ohio, was also one of the inaugural winners of the NASA Space Tech Catalyst Prize. O'Brien is also the assistant director of SciAccess, led by OSU 2018 alum Anna Voelker, which focuses on making science accessible to the entire human community, including those with disabilities that can get in the way of those opportunities. Anna won the 2023 Diversity Champion Award from the OSU Alumni Association. The 2024 online SciAccess conference brought together hundreds of scientists and educators from around the world, with keynote talks from Blue Origins astronaut Dr. Chris Boshuizen, disability advocate and author Dr. Ashley Shew, and recording artist and cultural activist Lachi. You can find out more about SciAccess here.

Thank you!

Professional astronomers know how lucky we are to have our job description: make discoveries about the universe, teach students and the public about those discoveries, and train younger scientists to make those discoveries themselves. We are grateful to all of you who have supported Ohio State astronomy and astrophysics by attending our public events, taking our classes, cheering our successes, and making donations that support our students, our outreach programs, and our research. Your generous contributions make a huge difference to our efforts, from undergraduate scholarships to public events to recruiting and retaining brilliant faculty. Throughout my years as department chair, I have felt these contributions as the wind at our backs, lifting us to the ranks of the nation's top astronomy institutions.

If you want to donate to OSU astronomy or CCAPP, you can always do so at Give to Astronomy or Give to CCAPP.

Ohio State has been a fantastic place to be an astronomy professor for the last 30 years, and it has been a privilege to serve as department chair. Have a great summer, and I look forward to seeing you at FOSAA events next year.

Best Wishes, 

David Weinberg
Distinguished University Professor
(Outgoing) Chair of OSU Astronomy