Astronomer at WSU is starry-eyed

OGDEN — A little girl named Stacy Palen from Clinton, N.J., kept bombarding her mother with questions about science.

When she was 7 or 8 years old, Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" astronomy show was on television. Her mother thought the PBS series was a great opportunity to learn about science.

"She sat me down and said, 'You're going to watch this whole thing!"' Palen recalled. "And I complained for the first five minutes — and then after (that) I was totally happy to just sit there the whole time.

"I thought it was the most amazing stuff I had ever heard about."

She earned her bachelor's degree in physics at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J., and her master's in astronomy and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, where she met her husband, John Armstrong.

Today she is an assistant professor of physics at Weber State University, where Armstrong is an astrobiologist. She also directs WSU's Ott Planetarium and astronomical observatory.

A dynamic speaker, Palen has given presentations for Clark Planetarium and the Salt Lake Astronomical Society, Salt Lake City, and the Ogden Astronomical Society, Ogden. She also teaches astronomy, physics with calculus, and quantum mechanics.

She has carried out astronomical research at some of the world's most noted observatories, including Kitt Peak National Observatory southwest of Tucson; the European Southern Observatory in Chile; the Very Long Baseline Array of radio telescopes that stretch across the United States; and the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, also in Chile.

Palen has made a special study of planetary nebulae, both in our own galaxy and two nearby galaxies.

These glowing gas clouds are called planetaries because they can look like planets when viewed through a telescope. Actually, a planetary nebula is the vastly expanded outer envelope of gases surrounding a star originally about the size of our sun. The gas is puffed out when the star is dying.

The following is excerpted from an interview with her, conducted at WSU on Thursday:

Deseret Morning News: "What are you discovering about these planetaries?"

Palen: "We thought in the 1980s that we totally understood them, because we had very sad pictures that weren't very good resolution. And so it looked like planetary nebulae were all round. ... That makes a lot of sense, because you have a round star and it dies, and it sheds its outer layers and it makes a round cocoon.