Newsmaker
Judith Pipher Named to National Women‘s Hall of Fame
STAR SCIENCE: A noted astronomer, Pipher will be inducted
into the National Women‘s Hall of Fame this fall. Photo credit: Trippy Photography.
Judith Pipher, professor emeritus of physics and astronomy, will be inducted
into the National Women‘s Hall of Fame in recognition of her excellence
as a teacher of young women and men, and for the exceptional advances she‘s
made in the field of infrared astronomy. The induction ceremony will take place
this October.
Pipher has been a member of the University faculty since 1971, just after
earning her doctorate from Cornell University in the newly emerging field of
infrared astronomy. She joins eight other women as the newest members of the
Seneca Falls, New York, based national organization that recognizes and celebrates
the achievements of individual American women.
Pipher was one of the first U.S. astronomers to turn an infrared array toward
the skies. In 1983, she and colleagues mounted a prototype infrared detector
onto a telescope in a small River Campus observatory, taking the first-ever
telescopic infrared pictures of the moon.
She has since led the development of near-infrared detector arrays, serving
as one of the main forces moving the field from rudimentary single-pixel devices
to today‘s virtually flawless multi-megapixel arrays. Pipher‘s
work in infrared technology has had a profound influence on all subsequent
work in astronomy, the study of our astronomical origins, and the study of
the structure and evolution of the universe.
In 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is equipped with
infrared detectors Pipher helped design. With the telescope now in orbit, Pipher
uses the instrument to investigate, among other things, clusters of forming
stars and brown dwarfs, massive, planet-like objects too small to become stars,
and hence too cool and dark to be seen by ground-based telescopes. And because
interstellar dust obscures much of the visible spectrum of light, infrared
instruments in space make it possible to peer through to the object beyond
the dust.
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