Photo-Illustration by Christine Hipp.

The sun was up all night long. Marci Beitch unwraps the scarf covering her face and crawls out from under her sleeping bag, which is supposed to protect against temperatures of up to minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Beitch rises to her feet. Removing the plastic door of her tent, she steps out into the snow where a cluster of yellow tents dot the landscape. A 10 meter tall bright red crane fills her vision, standing above a hole in the center of the camp. Bracing against the cold, Beitch gets ready for another 10-hour work day at the bottom of the world: Antartica.

“There really wasn’t an average day,” Beitch said, in retrospect.

Beitch, a UC Santa Cruz graduate student, was one of about 50 researchers who called Antarctica home Jan. 21–31 during the 2012 and 2013 field season of the Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling project (WISSARD). The project brings together professors, engineers and graduate students from nine institutions to meet once a year in Antarctica. They set up base above Lake Whillans — a subglacial lake 800 meters beneath the ice. This year was the first that they transported, assembled and employed an environmentally-friendly drill to reach the lake.

For UCSC glaciologist Slawek Tulaczyk, the research literally opened up new worlds. While Tulaczyk gazed at the framed picture of a barren Antarctic field that hangs on the wall of his air-conditioned office, he recalled the expedition’s purpose.

“The first focus of the project is to study microbial life, which survive in environments deficient in light, organic matter and oxygen,” Tulaczyk said. “This will allow scientists to better understand conditions of habitability for other planets and how genetic mechanisms enable microbes to survive under difficult conditions. The second focus is to study mechanisms of motion for the West Antarctic ice sheet, as this will allow scientists to better predict future changes in global sea levels due to a warming climate.”

Antarctica offers a short window of “hospitality” — November through the end of January — for any research to be safely conducted. The window was used sparingly for preparation, yet little time remained for actual research.

The core project took place over a five day drilling period from Jan. 21–26 and a five day data collection period from Jan. 27–31. This story serves as an inside look at the rigors of collegial research, as it was done before the clock’s minute hand effectively sealed the hole at 11:59 p.m. on Jan. 31 — the project’s deadline.

The Antarctic research team lowers a cable 800 meters below the icy surface into a bore hole to collect temperature and seismic data. Photo courtesy of Slawek Tulaczyk.

Building Toward Antarctica

The expedition begins here, in the forested region of UC Santa Cruz.

UCSC has played a role in the WISSARD project from its very beginning when Professors Slawek Tulaczyk of UCSC and Helen Amanda Fricker of UC San Diego first developed the idea of drilling into Lake Whillans around 2007. The professors pitched their idea to other U.S. scientists and successfully pushed The National Science Foundation (NSF) for most of their funding, which came through several grants including ones made to UCSC, Montana State University and Northern Illinois University. Tulaczyk then joined with UCSC professors Andrew Fisher and Susan Schwartz to plan the project as a team.

Tulaczyk said UCSC’s temperature data will be shared with other universities that took part in the project. Seismic data collected by UCSC will be kept exclusively for the Earth and Planetary Sciences department to study for a couple years before it is released in a public database.

In early summer of 2012, UCSC instrument engineer Dan Sampson began coordinating with instrumentation specialist Robin Bolsey and UCSC undergraduate Kyle Johnson to prepare the necessary instruments for subglacial research.

“The idea was to put together as complete a geophysical [instrument] package as possible,” Sampson said.

While Sampson and Bolsey designed the equipment UCSC used in Antarctica, undergraduate students from the Earth and Planetary Sciences department helped improve instrument designs and prepare cables and storage boxes.

The team used National Science Foundation (NSF) grants to construct several instruments from scratch, like a sediment piston corer to snatch sediment from the lake and a seismometer to detect minute vibrations in the ice sheet.

“The undergraduates had no comprehensive engineering background,” Sampson said, “but their feedback as sophisticated users was invaluable in providing suggestions for improvement and they were an intelligent bunch with a lot of good ideas.”

Undergraduate students Krista Myers, Nick Geier and Connor Williams coiled miles of cable to place inside a 20 foot storage container at the edge of the woods behind Baskin Engineering.

“What we did was mostly to help reel the cables onto a large reel,” Myers said. “We’d reel 800 meters on this huge crank reel that we would

it was fun. We got to jam to some KZSC while we were reeling away for hours.”

Myers said while undergraduates didn’t receive school credit for their summer work, it did give them the resume-worthy experience of working on an international research project.

UCSC professor Slawek Tulaczyk lowers cables to the bottom of a subglacial lake. Photo courtesy of Slawek Tulaczyk.

Stepping Into Snow

With the summer almost over, undergraduates helped pack and ship instruments and miles of cables sent in October and November.  All supplies landed on the shore of Antarctica at the McMurdo Station. From there, many instruments were flown to the field site while monster truck-sized snow tractors hauled platform equipment across 600 miles of frozen tundra.

Professor Tulaczyk and UCSC graduate students Marci Beitch and Ken Mankoff learned how to operate instruments in the deep-field — a term researchers use for Antarctic sites which don’t offer the safety of a nearby permanent station with ready access to heating, water, food and emergency care. In Antarctica, being even 2 miles away from a permanent station is referred to as the deep-field. This camp found itself 600 miles away from safety.

After six years of planning, Tulaczyk, Bolsey, Sampson and the grad students found themselves in one of the world’s most inhospitable places separated from their data by half a mile of ice.

“It’s different from almost any other place on Earth,” Tulaczyk said. “It’s like another planet.”

University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers operated a hot water drill for five days to open an 800 meter deep borehole to the lake. Researchers rushed for five more days to conduct research at the borehole by the end of Jan. 31— the calendar end of Antarctic summer and the date NSF mandated researchers must leave the site to avoid encroaching harsh weather.

The man-made borehole began to slowly freeze over, and due to the Jan. 31 deadline, the hole could not be re-drilled and continually used for research.

Beitch recalled that working at the borehole in the middle of the night exposed researchers to minus 20-degree temperatures.

“I remember a very cold night,” Beitch said. “I was working until 4 a.m. or so at the borehole, during which a cup of very hot water developed an icy surface in less than an hour. One other day a freezing fog blew over the camp and little beads of fog were freezing to my eyelashes.”

With eyes framed in ice the researchers continued their work.

“Scientists were sending measurement and sample collection instruments down around the clock,” Beitch said. “Some were working up to 20 hours. There was no regularity to the days out there. It was like ‘Okay, I’m working a shift from 7 p.m. to 4 a.m., I’m going to sleep from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. and then I’m going back on another shift.’”

Tulaczyk, Bolsey, Sampson, Beitch and Mankoff often deployed the instruments for other universities when those university team members took a break.

“We had a very collegial team on the ice,” Tulaczyk said. “Nonetheless, some difficult decisions had to be made as there was insufficient time to accomplish all the science experiments. We were able to prioritize and cut tasks but we walked away from the field season still talking to each other.”

To combat the monotony of endlessly lowering and pulling cables at the borehole, the drill team blasted music from a boombox.

“We played James Brown continuously,” Beitch said. “That heated us up, for sure.”

UCSC graduate student Grace Barcheck missed out on the soul-infused cable pulling, instead venturing out of the camp to set up GPS and seismic-recording devices 100 kilometers downstream from the Whillans ice flow.

Barcheck and two researchers formed the safety minimum of a three person group as they travelled on well-packed ski-doo snowmobiles. Riding for hours on what Tulaczyk likened to a mechanical bull, Barcheck finally pulled her ski-doo into the downstream site. The group spent nearly a whole day pitching camp and the next four days setting up seismometer and GPS instruments. After the planned five days ended, subtle isolation anxiety began and the group rode their mechanical bulls back to the  site.

“We came back and we were all really excited to see civilization,” Barcheck said. “[The main camp] consisted of  containers and some more tents, but it was such a relief to have more people around. It’s not that I didn’t like the people I was with, but isolation is very strange.”

A crane lowers instruments into the bore hole. Photo courtesy of Slawek Tulaczyk.

Working for the Play

Work in the frigid camp stopped on the last night of sampling, as researchers packed up supplies. Some exhausted researchers took up reading, guitar playing, chilly walks and cross-country snow skiing, which the deadline had earlier ruled out. On the last night, Mankoff took out a big marker and scribbled on the empty packing boxes to transform them into oversized playing dice.

“We didn’t actually play craps with them,” Mankoff said. “But we were going to try to play backgammon. When we had a short amount of downtime, people were having fun.”

After the fifth day the borehole started to freeze over as the experiments and James Brown music ceased.

The minus 20 degree Fahrenheit winds retook this deep-field site in Antarctica, as the researchers flew to McMurdo station on the Antarctic coast and from there toward the warmer comfort of home.

In that now frozen borehole the UCSC researchers left a three-component, short-period, high-gain seismometer, a string of geophones and a fiber optic temperature sensor to record future data, but what they took from that borehole is both more understandable and more meaningful.

“The UCSC team hadn’t planned to bring back samples of the sediment or water this season,” Beitch said, “so we did not get the permits to do so. The only things we were able to take from the field were the relationships, the fun times and the laughter with these incredible people that we got to work with. Being a part of such groundbreaking, or ice breaking work was so cool. It just epitomizes the word cool.”

Photo courtesy of The Institute for Humanities Research.

The UC Santa Cruz philosophy department hosted a multicultural conference last Saturday entitled “Free to Universalize or Bound by Culture? Philosophy in a Multicultural Context.”

The event addressed a philosophical inquiry into cultural practice, and was held in the Humanities I building from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The conference featured 14 Californian philosophers who gathered before an audience of both students and faculty to engage in collective discourse.

In an interdisciplinary venue like UCSC, assistant professor of philosophy Rasmus G. Winther said he hopes to see multiculturalism in action. Winther organized the event with the support of the philosophy department and the Institute for Humanities Research, and said California has a special role to play in globalized discourse.

“I like the ethics of creativity and I think that’s something that [philosophers] should export,” Winther said. “California can export, not necessarily the idea per se, but more a methodology of negotiating and being creative with ideas.”

Winther said he hoped the conference would serve as a temporary venue for critical interaction where researchers and thinkers from the Bay Area could address issues surrounding multiculturalism in philosophy.

“I’m very passionate about communication and miscommunication and forms of what one might call … cross-cultural violence — both verbally and physically — and how we as thinkers and intellectuals can negotiate a better understanding, and ultimately a peace,” Winther said.

The conference also addressed the question of how philosophers should be responsible in both communicating and justifying their discourse in varying cultural contexts. Carlos Montemayor, assistant professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University said academic philosophers must take questions a step further.

“Take sciences, the basic metaphysical picture, and assume it to be the ultimate reality without any real critical inquiry,” Montemayor said. “A full account of justification can’t just be spelling out norms about proper, good observations or good reasoning.”

Amir Najimi, a statistician and search ads engineer from Google, said that multiculturalism will not withstand the “compartmentalization implied by tolerance,” and in order to get comfortable with our cultural closeness, academia needs “philosophies of engagement.”

“There’s no ‘outside’ anymore,” Najimi said. “It seems people’s ideas, values and cultural artifacts from all over the world are fated to bump into each other, either physically or virtually. In such a society, treading softly around divergent values or keeping respectfully aloof is no longer possible.”

Like many of the philosophers present at the conference, UCSC philosophy professor Daniel Guevara addressed this concern through a method of analytic philosophy.

“Analytic philosophy conceives of philosophy primarily as a form of logic,” Guevara said. “Logic is the most universal thing.”

Helen Longino, the event’s keynote speaker and feminist philosopher at Stanford University, argued for philosophers to abandon the a priori approach — the theoretical deduction approach — and their own subjectivities.

Longino said there is not one correct analysis of knowledge, because there can be no impartial approach to engaging a culture in critical discourse.

“There may be no way to integrate the plurality of approaches … we don’t require that these accounts be consistent one with the other,” Longino said. “So, the pluralist stance that we’re advocating keeps in the forefront the idea that scientific inquiry represents some aspects of the world, but often at the cost of obscuring and even distorting others.”

Winther said academic philosophy is often criticized for inhabiting an “ivory tower,” one he hopes can be broken down to provoke collective, philosophic thought rather than shielding it from public participation.

“This is particularly true for the dominant analytical tradition, which seems to forget that it is, after all, people who are philosophizing,” Winther said. “People are embedded in a body and culture, and live in a confused and rich tangle of feelings, desires, and dreams. Multiculturalism reminds us that all of this needs to be taken into account in philosophizing about the human condition. We must get out of the ivory tower, and perhaps invite others up into it.”

Illustration by Leigh Douglas

Back in 1980, environmental advocate and childrens’ entertainer Raffi released the song “Baby Beluga.”

If it weren’t for Kavna — the beluga whale that was on display at the Vancouver Aquarium at the time — he might have never written the blissful ballad often associated with childhood memories today.

That was the ‘80s. Now, the impact of wildlife captivity for the sake of scientific research needs to be questioned.

In a recent proposal, the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta applied for a federal permit to import 18 beluga whales to be divided among a group of marine parks in the U.S.

The Georgia Aquarium’s proposal stated that marine parks needed the endangered whales for “captive breeding efforts, research and education.”

The marine parks involved with the proposed plan — and coincidentally the prices each park plans to pay for the whales — have not been released.

While the public display of marine life may be seen to have strict educational intentions, there is a conflict between captive research and the public display of wildlife for the purpose of entertainment.

The proposal may be beneficial for building a captive breeding population for the threatened species, but it fails to recognize the scientific importance of the belugas’ natural habitat.

According to National Geographic’s website, beluga whales are known to be extremely social mammals with complex migrational patterns. As acoustic communicators, beluga whales primarily travel in pods where social interaction is critical to the survival of the species.

Inability to provide an environment that will meet the needs of the animals may hinder any research aimed toward preventing the species from becoming endangered.

Only a natural habitat can facilitate this environment — and any effort toward replicating one in captivity is poised to fail.

The reasoning behind the Georgia Aquarium’s request does highlight a necessary effort to preserve the beluga whale species. But with so many factors working against the ability to replicate a suitable environment for the whales, the only effective aspect of the animals’ import would be for the sake of public display.

The New York Times reported that at least four of the nation’s largest marine parks currently invite visitors to “don wetsuits and pet or be nuzzled by the animals for $140 to $250.” The publication added that the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago also offers couples a “romantic wading experience that can culminate in a marriage proposal with Champagne, strawberries and the beluga as a de facto chaperon.”

Whether or not this sounds appealing, the species should not be imported solely for the purpose of public entertainment and inevitably flawed methods of research.

Educating the public about issues in the scientific community is just as important as solving them.

The displacement of animals from their natural habitats for the sake of flawed research not only detracts from the proposal’s intent of scientific research, but the education of animal behavior is critical to understanding wildlife as a whole.

"I'm really into neuroscience stuff ... and social questions, I'd like to see more of that." Anthony Ortiz, Fourth-year, Stevenson, history and politics

"Herbal and botanical medicine. I would like to see more hard evidence on that." Kaia Jystad, fourth-year, Merrill, Biology

"More research in nanotechnology." Michael Hinojosa, first-year, Merrill, history

"I think the cancer research is amazing ... and anything that would focus on community or ethnic studies." Hannah Mykel, fourth-year, College Ten, cognitive sciences

Professor Gliessman. Illustration by Leigh Douglas

For the past 30 years, UC Santa Cruz has offered resources for students interested in contributing to campus sustainability through programs like the Community Agroecology Network (CAN) and the Program in Community and Agroecology (PICA).

Within the UC system, these programs, which offer educational opportunities to students interested in everything from organic farming to social justice, are unique to UCSC — but that doesn’t mean they can’t fall victim to financial woes.

“The fact [these programs] exist on our campus shows you how much effort the students and the campus put into creating a better sustainable agroecological network for ourselves and our future communities,” said Kirsten Williams, fourth-year sociology major and development and events coordinator at the campus sustainability office.

The agroecology program at UCSC is a holistic and interdisciplinary program, drawing students from programs like environmental studies, community studies and the biological sciences for a common goal of contributing to campus sustainability.

The program was founded in 1982 by current agroecology professor Steve Gliessman, who also serves as the Alfred E. Heller Endow chair, a position that appropriates funds for university-affiliated programs like PICA.

However, the UC-wide budget crisis, in addition to Gliessman’s impending retirement from the university at the year’s end, has put the future funding of
undergraduate resource programs like CAN and PICA at risk.

“We aren’t free from larger budget problems,” said Andrew Holstedt, fourth-year environmental studies major and PICA intern. “A big issue is staff. For PICA, we’ve had to substantially decrease hours.”
As Gliessman plans to retire, future funding decisions for programs like CAN and PICA will be left to the incoming chair. Program funds collected from private donors are appropriated as the chair sees fit.

“I’ve used those funds for [agroecology programs] … I could have used [the funds] for research,” Gliessman said.

Both CAN and PICA offer classes that may be taken for credit, like “Environmental Education and Sustainability.” Additionally, the programs offer student-led seminars teaching sustainable living skills, and also host community meals, serving student-cultivated food organically grown on campus. Gliessman said programs like CAN and PICA have introduced students to a new approach called “action education.”
“You’re learning something in order to do something — to bring about change that is needed in society,” Gliessman said. “You’re not just learning facts. You’re learning skills that you can take out in the community and create change where it needs to happen.”

Alongside environmental concerns, social justice remains a significant issue within both programs. In addition to incorporating organic gardening practices on campus, the programs advocate the development of direct farmer-to-consumer relationships with food producers, such as coffee growers in Central America.
“We try to create as many opportunities as we can for undergraduates to get their hands on these things and engage in food systems issues directly, especially the social justice side of that,” Gliessman said.
Many students have found the resources offered by these programs as important to the future of not only the UCSC community but for communities on a larger local, regional and global scale.

“Programs like CAN and PICA offer students and our community members the ability to learn about the organic food systems and sustainable living to help promote a healthier society as a whole,” Williams said.
Until the future funding of such programs is decided, Bee Vadakan, director of education at the Sustainable Living Center, said she “encourages students to voice their support.”

“The [university’s] cutting of innovative programs that focus on student-led teaching lower the quality of education that is available to students,” Vadakan said. “I think [the university] needs to hear what’s meaningful and important to students.”

Free weekly dinners hosted by Friends of CAN (FOCAN) are also held on Tuesday nights from 6 to 8 p.m. in Building A of the Sustainable Living Center, located next to the Farm.
For additional information on campus sustainability efforts, visit www.canunite.org and ucscpica.org in addition to casfs.ucsc.edu/, http://sustainability.ucsc.edu/. and http://sec.enviroslug.org

Illustration by Christine Hipp.

UC Santa Cruz now holds the title of the third most influential research institution in the world, ranking ahead of both Stanford and Harvard, according to a recent report published in The Times Higher Education.

The study, conducted by Thomson Reuters, spanned a six-year period measuring the frequency in which research compiled by UCSC faculty received citation in scholarly journals published by universities around the globe. UCSC received a citation score of 99.9, along with UCSB, Cal Tech and Rice University. Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scored 100, while Harvard and Stanford received totals of 99.8.

“Getting a ranking like this tells everybody very loudly [that] not only is this a researching university, but that its right at the top of international pyramid in quality,” said Bruce Margon, vice chancellor of research at UCSC.

With a student body of 16,000 and around 650 researching faculty members, UCSC is the second smallest UC campus.

“This will be a very nice reminder to people that yes, we are small, but actually we are a hugely internationally recognized center of research excellence,” Margon said.

Universities with larger faculty populations have the capacity to publish greater amounts of research, which translate to higher citation scores. This makes UCSC’s third overall ranking all the more impressive.

“The nice thing about this study is that it was a study of quality, not quantity,” Margon said. “It was a study of what impact UCSC faculty discoveries make, not how many discoveries they make.”

UCSC came in at No. 110 in the overall world university rankings. Along with research influence, rankings are determined by overall research, international outlook, income and teaching. UCSC received its lowest score in teaching at 28.5, followed by industry income at 29.5 and international outlook at 29.8. Overall research clocked in with a score of 36.5. Scores reflecting teaching, overall research and international outlook are weighed heavily on international reputation, which 46-year-old UCSC lacks on paper when compared to older universities such as UC Berkeley, Princeton and Harvard.

The reputation UCSC is building as a research powerhouse relies heavily on the relationship between faculty and undergraduate students.

“Undergraduate students benefit from research excellence in the university because they are being taught by the creator of knowledge, not just some messenger,” Margon said.

According to Margon, of the 10-campus UC system, UCSC ranks only second behind Berkeley in producing students who go on to pursue graduate degrees.

“Students at UCSC, because it is a small, intimate setting, get a lot of opportunities to work directly with faculty,” Margon said. “They get the spark.They get the fever for how cool it is to do research.”

Many faculty members enjoy the relationship they have with undergraduate students.

“My most rewarding experiences as a professor have been doing research with undergraduates,” said Greg Laughlin, astronomy and astrophysics professor and department chair.

Kevin Schlaufmann, a postdoctoral researcher in the astronomy and astrophysics department, said UCSC is a great place for undergraduates to conduct research, as professors are both internationally recognized through their research and focused on teaching at the same time.

Research conducted at UCSC also generates private funds, namely from federal grants, industry and philanthropy.

“Our research excellence creates greater educational opportunity for our students that wouldn’t be available otherwise, and certainly [won’t] be available as the state of California collapses its financial support for the university,” Margon said.

According to Margon, between $125 and $150 million is generated by the research conducted at UCSC each year. Much of this money is injected into Santa Cruz County, stimulating the local economy.

Past studies based on citation impact and research influence have seen favorable results for UCSC. In 2008, the astronomy and astrophysics department received a top research influence ranking among U.S universities, while the physics department received a top U.S. ranking in 2007. In 2001, UCSC was ranked second worldwide in physical sciences research.

When combined with the recent third-place research influence ranking, some hope UCSC’s growing reputation will contribute to securing needed support during unstable financial times.

“If you are competing for funding, the best predictor of future performance is past performance,” professor Laughlin said. “My hope is that in a tight funding climate, the fact that we have really shown what we can do will help us in competing, and really make this university continue the world-class tradition we have.”

Proffessor Garth Illingworth has used the Hubble Telescope to view some of the oldest images in the universe. He is studying galaxies as they looked near the dawn of cosmic time. Photo by Isaac Miller.

Left: Professor Stan Woosley has made big discoveries with super novae. Right: Galactic archeologist Connie Rockosi is studying the Milky Way to uncover the secrets of galaxy formation. Photos by Isaac Miller.

UC Santa Cruz Professor Garth Illingworth has been using the Hubble Telescope to peer across the universe through space and time. He compares his study of early galaxy formation to an 80-year-old man looking back on his days as toddler.

Illingworth and his team of investigators are utilizing the recently repaired and updated piece of equipment to look to the other side of the known universe from where the 13 billion-year-old light is just arriving now. Experts estimate that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, so these images are a snapshot back to the galaxies as they appeared just 650 million years after the big bang and the dawn of cosmic time. The images are deeper in the universe than any astronomer has ever gazed and farther back in time than anyone has ever seen.

“The light has taken so long to reach us that we’re really looking back in time,” Illingworth said in his strong Australian accent. “It’s the only time we can really do that.”

The Hubble Telescope, currently in orbit around the earth, is only about the width of Illingworth’s office — a mere 2.4 meters. But for the past 20 years, Hubble has been taking some of the most stunning pictures in the field of space exploration. The most recent repairs to Hubble have allowed Illingworth to take the best images yet. Some of the photographs required four days of exposure time.

Illingworth and his co-investigators have dubbed the project the Hubble Ultra Deep Field program, or HUDF09. Right now, they are in the thick of research and documentation.

On a Friday afternoon as most students and teachers are getting an early start on their weekend, the professor is just getting comfortable in his office on Science Hill with his shoes kicked off, revealing his thin black socks. He holds his head in one hand and a blue pen in the other. Illingworth is hard at work, making corrections to an essay he and his colleagues submitted last December to “Nature,” a scientific journal. The journal’s editors would like to see a second draft from Illingworth and his colleagues before they consider running the story in an upcoming issue.

Contention and disagreement about what makes good writing and research are nothing new to the field of astronomy. Scientists are trying to figure out the reasons and physical characteristics behind phenomena such as black holes, super novae, and dark matter. But the feeling of rejection, if only temporary, still feels odd to Illingworth.

“For us, it’s pretty uncommon to be told, ‘it shouldn’t be published,’” he said.

That’s because UCSC’s Astronomy and Astrophysics Department is one of the best in the nation. World-renowned department chair Sandra Faber has recently been granted a record 902 orbits on the Hubble telescope to survey 250,000 distant galaxies and study the first third of cosmic time. Professor Stan Woosley and his colleges have made groundbreaking discoveries on gamma ray bursts. And UCSC’s group of researchers is the most cited worldwide.

They also have access to the world class facilities in Lick Observatory in San Jose, where Illingworth spends some of his time, and Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The observatory has the world’s second largest telescope at 10 meters.

The images from HUDF09 have been made public and can be studied by anyone, but it was Illingworth and his team’s proposal and attention to detail that won them the bid. In the world of space discovery every detail matters. Illingworth says each of their 192 orbits on the telescope costs National Aeronautics and Space and Administration (NASA) $100,000.

Astronomers, like Illingworth, say the money is well spent and that they are searching to find answers in the universe and our place in it.

Weight of the World

At 30 years old, assistant professor Connie Rockosi could be seen as the next generation of astronomy at UCSC. Much of her office’s hallway in the Interdisciplinary Science Building is dominated by older and middle-aged men.

Rockosi is studying the organization and composition of the Milky Way and nearby Adromeda Galaxy in order to try and determine just how galaxies form.

“People have called the thing I do galactic archeology,” Rockosi said. “[We’re] trying to understand what the universe was like when the galaxy formed by looking at things left over from that period of time.”

Rockosi’s artifacts are planets and stars — the older, larger, and more nearby, the better. But in the world of astronomy, “nearby” is a relative term. The closest star besides our sun is more than four light-years away — over 25 billion miles in distance. Rockosi says the stars she studies are “unimaginably far away in human standards,” but that the light now reaching us “left its source a very, very tiny fraction of the universe ago.”

The milky way formed and grew over the course of millions of years as clusters and galaxies collided into one another finding themselves sucked into the mutual attractions of each other’s gravitational pull. Many of these stars have already died and been reborn several times. The chemical composition of these celestial bodies and the periodic elements found inside them tell her just how many times the stars have died and more about their life cycles.

Rockosi’s survey of 300,000 stars will also help scientists determine the mass of the Milky Way. Rockosi is taking part in efforts to help weigh the Milky Way. The complicated procedure involves finding large stars and measuring their gravitational effects on the rest of the galaxay.

Graduate student Valentino Gonzalez has been working with Illingworth on HUDF09 and says that Rockosi is telling a different part of the same story that Illingworth is trying to tell. While Illingworth and his team of investigators are looking at images of distant galaxies, Rockosi is examining our own Milky Way, digging for clues into the past. They are both trying to learn how galaxies form.

“It’s a totally different approach but it’s the same problem,” Gonzalez said.

“It all has to do with how the universe manages to come together in such a way that we have galaxies that have stars in them and stars that have planets in them — so here we are,” Rockosi said. “How does that work? That’s the question many of us would like to answer. How does it all work?”

Stardust

Professor Stan Woosley, an expert in super novae and stellar explosions, found his area of interest by accident. Fascinated in the creation of elements since he was a young child, he later learned that all of the known elements, besides hydrogen and helium, were made in stars. So, while a super nova is the death of a star, he doesn’t think of it as an event of destruction.

“It’s creation,” Woosley said. “We are stardust. We are the children of the stars. This is true. … For there to be life, there has to be carbon and silica and iron and oxygen and heavier elements. Those all came from stars and mostly from super novae. Super novae are explosions, but they are creative explosions. They are the furnaces of creation that are spewing out elements of life all over the universe.”

To demonstrate a point, Woosley grabs a green plastic gun and starts pulling the trigger, trying to get it to work.

With some frustration, the 65-year-old professor shakes the small toy, which most days, he says, emits rings of smoke similar to the shells of light released in some super novae. After some persistent and playful rattling, he gives up, sets the gun down and smiles.

In 2007, Woosley took the scientific community by storm when he discovered those shells of light and used them to explain a stellar explosion 100 times brighter than a typical super nova. Most super novae only convert 1 percent of their kinetic energy into light because the light gets trapped in the star as it expands. But a Type 1a super novae, Woosley has discovered, can release more light because it escapes in large shells as the star explodes.

Woosley has made other groundbreaking discoveries as well. In the 1990s he discovered the origins behind gamma ray bursts, mysterious electromagnetic flashes which had puzzled scientists for over 30 years. Woosley found that the bursts have a close connection with super novae. According to his now widely accepted collapsar model, the gamma ray bursts shoot out of a dying star large enough to create a black hole and implode.

Woosley calls himself “probably the greatest skeptic of my models,” many of which are widely accepted by encyclopedias and scholars everywhere. He is not particularly concerned with making new discoveries. He prefers teaching, experimenting, and sharing perspectives with those around him.

“People like my ideas. I’ve got prizes. I’m in the National Academy of Sciences. I’m in the National Academy of Arts and Sciences,” Woosley said listing off his accomplishments as if tired of them. “I’ve got the Beta Prize of the American Physical Society, the Rossi Prize of the Astronomical society, so yeah, I’ve made it, OK? Nowadays, I just like to be left alone.”

Aging World, New Ideas

“The Universe is old,” says Illingworth, a hint of nostalgia in his voice.

About 10 to 11 billion years ago, the universe experienced its peak in galaxy and star formation. He says the night would have been lit with bright, glowing galaxies across the sky. Illingworth leans forward closer to his two 30 inch computer monitors and points to a line graph that shows the peak of galactic activity hovering at about 3 billion years after the big bang.

“Every year that goes by, less and less things are happening in the universe,” Illingworth said. “In that sense, it’s in its quiescent phase. The universe will slowly get cooler. Things will spread out more. The galaxies won’t be as bright. There’s just not very much happening.”

The time Illingworth has been studying was more densely packed with stars, planets, and galactic activity than our own. He calls research like his “cohesive” for society. He says that Americans can celebrate space exploration together because they are curious, and they find it important.

“The tax payer funds these sort of activities” he said of his research. “It’s a tiny fraction of the country’s budget, but it returns a lot, and I think it’s socially important too.”

In 2008 the United States spent a total of $17.8 billion on NASA’s research funding, space exploration, and educational costs — .6 percent of the United States budget for that year. Professor Illingworth, Professor Woosley, and graduate student Gonzalez all note that when a country achieves financial stability and success, one of the first things they do is invest in astronomy. Even Chile, where Gonzalez grew up, is known for its world class observatories.

“So, the question is, ‘should the country be willing to spend so much money on research?’ And I would say, ‘yes’ because I’m an astronomer, and I’m interested in this,” Gonzalez said. “And I think science is one of the things that makes us human, one of the things that makes a society worth being a society.”

NASA is currently planning for their decadal survey, which comes out this summer and for which they plan out many of their next projects for the next ten years and present the estimated costs to Congress. At the top of their list is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is slated to cost five billion dollars. The telescope will sit in space, just beyond the moon and orbit around the sun. The telescope is going to be the next Hubble — but larger, more powerful, and with less light pollution from the earth.

Scientists hope to put the JWST into space by 2014, around the time that the 20 year old Hubble Telescope is expected to fall into inescapable disrepair. To some, it may sound like just another telescope. But to Illingwoth, it’s another time machine.

“We’re exploring our origins,” Illingworth said, “which is what this all is about.”