Utahns part of gamma-ray study

From a professor of physics to a Bountiful High School student, about a dozen Utahns are involved in a $13.1 million project in Arizona to research gamma rays.

Funding for an observatory called VERITAS (the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) recently was approved by the National Science Foundation. The U.S. Department of Energy is also funding the project.

The observatory is to be built on Kitt Peak in southern Arizona. Four telescopes are to be functioning by the end of 2006. Meanwhile, a prototype is already at work on Mount Hopkins south of Tucson, Ariz.

Chief of the University of Utah's team is physics professor David Kieda. According to the university, other Utahns involved are Paolo Gondolo, assistant professor of physics; Robert Atkins, a postdoctoral researcher; graduate students Gar Walker, Tomo Nagai and Jeter Hall; undergraduates Dan Allen, Mike Snure, Josh Kagele, Gary Finnegan and Chris Ballard; and Emily Toone, an 11th-grade student at Bountiful High School.

They are among researchers from across the United States and Great Britain involved in the project, which promises to deliver a new view of mysterious high-energy radiation emerging from such objects in space as nebulas in our own Milky Way galaxy and the active hearts of other galaxies.

"It's all moving forward, and it's an official project now," Kieda told the Deseret Morning News.

The Crab nebula is an example of the type of object that emits gamma radiation. The Crab is the remnant of a star that exploded, with the light of the supernova reaching Earth in the year 1054. At the center of its expanding nebula of glowing gas is the star's remains, a spinning hulk called a pulsar because it sends out pulses of radiation.

High-energy gamma radiation from the pulsar was detected about 15 years ago.

The pulsar is the kind of stationary source of gamma radiation that VERITAS can observe in detail. But the array should be able to find many other strange objects. Among these may be active galactic nuclei, the centers of what are called active galaxies.

Such a galaxy is thought to have "a million solar-mass black hole at the center," Kieda said. This is a black hole with the mass 1 million times that of our sun.

As surrounding material is pulled into the black hole, some energized matter shoots out in an axis that could point toward Earth. Peering at the fluctuating energy in the axis is "like looking down the barrel of a gun," he said. Researchers may be able to figure out much more about what the black hole is doing and how it affects matter.