Aiding in this endeavor is the Southern Astrophysical Research, or SOAR, telescope. Situated 2,715 m above sea level on the mountain of Cerro Pachón in Chile, the SOAR telescope provides observers with some of the clearest conditions to view the night sky. Usage of the telescope has yielded results for MSU’s research efforts.

“This has been going on for an order of 20 years now, before I got here, MSU got involved in increasing its research staff and becoming more involved in astronomy research,” Stephen Zepf, associate chairperson for astronomy in the Department of Astronomy and Physics, said. 

In his time here, Zepf has overseen the SOAR telescope observe distant galaxy clusters, gamma radiation from high-energy photons and black hole phenomenon. The result is a higher standing for MSU within astrophysical research.

“One of the main ways we use it is in conjunction with observations from NASA satellites, so there are projects that combine SOAR observations with things like the NASA Chandra telescope data or might be related to a Hubble telescope project. ... From a university perspective, being able to dot that makes us more competitive internationally to give us time on those national and international tools,” Zepf said.

Recently, use of the telescope yielded data results that helped associate professor Jay Strader win a Packard Fellowship, a premier funding grant for science and engineering related research, for his studies on black holes.

Black holes emerge after a star reaches the end of its life cycle and implode due to the highly dense core collapsing in on itself. The large amount of matter compressed into such a tiny space creates a gravitational pull so strong that even light cannot escape, hence the name.

Because of these physical properties, black holes are incredibly difficult to study since there’s no direct way to observe them. They are studied by analyzing the behavior of celestial bodies around potential black hole sites.

“What it (the SOAR telescope) allows us to do is measure the motion of the star or gas around the candidate black hole and if it really is a black hole and the gravity of the black hole is strong enough then the object around it will be moving very quickly,” Strader said.

Even with such a high-powered telescope, observation is a tricky endeavor. The best locations to view black holes are in globular clusters, a concentrated area of stars, which at a far enough distance appear very close together.

“It’s kind of stressful and it’s certainly probably not as romantic as looking at beautiful Hubble pictures, you know,” Laura Shishkovsky, astrophysics and astronomy doctoral student, said. 

“The hard part about looking for these stars that are next to our candidates, in the clusters that we look through the telescope, is you have to try to find the exact star you’re looking for and globular clusters are really, really dense,” she said. “But it’s still exciting and it’s definitely important work and it’s important to our project that we do it properly.”