Astrophysicists launch outreach program

Frank

T hirty years after the NASA launch that put men on the moon, a College astrophysicist and his students plan a launch of their own. They've won funding to develop an outreach program that will put astrophysics on the desktop, allowing amateur astronomers, students, and others to design and conduct their own experiments.

A team led by astrophysicist Adam Frank has secured $650,000 from NASA and the National Science Foundation to continue its astrophysical research and to develop a stripped-down version of the complex computer codes that they run every day on supercomputers to simulate events like stellar birth and death. The program will be available for use by the community at a specially designed kiosk at the Strasenburgh Planetarium at the Rochester Museum & Science Center on East Avenue. The centerpiece will be a personal computer equipped with the program, dubbed "Astroflow," surrounded by several large, striking photos of the heavens taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

"With this program, kids will be able to tinker with a star. They'll be able to watch stars evolve according to their own instructions, for instance, or to see what happens when a star squirts out a monstrous amount of gas in a very short time," said Frank, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. "They might say, 'Give me an explosion twice as large,' and then learn about the conditions necessary, or they might change the velocity of a gas jet and see what happens."

Frank's students unveiled a prototype of the program at the May meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Chicago, and they hope to have the final product ready by next June when the University and Rochester Institute of Technology host the AAS annual summer meeting.