Donna Weistrop has spent her long career peering at things that can't be touched. But her work staring into space has brought in $1.4 million in federal grants since she came to UNLV 15 years ago. She's spent nine years developing an instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope and the past seven years analyzing the data that Hubble is sending back about distant galaxies. And, all the while, she's been opening the heavens to students in both introductory and advanced astronomy classes. Here she shares some of her observations.
Introductory classes give non-science majors a look at the scientific process. I try to teach students that science is not infallible. As we keep learning things, our interpretations will change. It's part of being an informed citizen. One day they're going to read about how a certain medicine is good for them; the next month another study will contradict that. They'll need to be able to process that information to make good decisions.
Most astronomers believe there is some kind of life somewhere in our galaxy, even if it is microscopic.
A lot of astronomical research now is done at a computer instead of going to an observatory. In the classroom that means we can work with real-world data rather than fake lab exercises, and we can bring up live images on the Web. The immediacy of that information is so much more powerful than looking at pictures in a 2-year-old textbook.
There's this amazing thing that happens when you're working with graduate students. Around the time they finish their master's and start working on the Ph.D., they just blossom. They transform from student into colleague — instead of me teaching them, we start learning from each other.
Gosh, I've always been interested in astronomy. I remember dragging my father out on Kingsbridge Road in New York City to see a solar eclipse when I was very young. I was lucky he encouraged my interests; that didn't happen for girls much in my day.
Getting into the sciences can still be a struggle for young women. If you do go into a science field, you still find that you're the different one; having one or two women in a department doesn't change that. There's still a certain amount of prejudice, of different treatment of women, but at least it's not overtly accepted anymore. Women of my generation find this very irritating because we were going to change the world — we were going to be the last ones to experience those issues.
Mostly, my research has centered on star formation in galaxies and how the galaxies interact with each other. If galaxies get close together, they can go into orbit around each other or they may merge. The idea is that this interaction spurs formation of new stars.
I'm part of the team that built a spectrograph for the Hubble Space Telescope. I've been analyzing that data for the last seven years. We have data on five different galaxies now and we're extracting from the data things like just how big the galaxies are, their chemical compositions. We're looking at "space bubbles" — they occur where there are a lot of young stars and stellar winds clear out an empty space. A graduate student and I discovered one of these in our data.
It's so obvious to me why we should want to more know more about what the universe is like — this is where we live. Biologists can tell us where people on this tiny planet come from. Astrophysicists tell us where the whole universe comes from. You might not need that knowledge for everyday life, but it will make life richer.
Students love going to observatories.
The great thing about astronomy is that it's accessible to anybody. You just look up and it's right there for you. (Actually, in Las Vegas, I recommend driving outside of town and looking up.)
