Just listen to Professor Edward Moran speak, and you will see a different side of science from the traditional image of chalk-covered theoretical physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists manipulating equations to concoct new theories of life, the universe, and everything that nobody actually understands.
Moran, chair of the Astronomy Department and director of the Van Vleck Observatory, doesn’t care for difficult physics problems.
“For me, along the way, research has really been about discovery,” Moran said in a recent lecture as part of the McNair Program Research Talks series. “That’s where the thrill and excitement is. I’m not particularly good at solving really hard physics problems, but I like thinking about problems that no one else has figured out how to solve yet that have to do with the nature of the universe. That’s what really turns me on and why I like to do what I do.”
Moran’s career as a researcher got off to an early start. His father was a pilot and taught him all about the nighttime sky from what he knew about celestial navigation. At age six, Edward made his first “discovery.” Looking up at the stars he saw something that looked like a dipper, but he knew it was neither the Big nor the Little. He had “discovered” the Pleiades star cluster.
“I was kind of thinking like a researcher already back then,” Moran said.
Now Moran’s research has him looking at small galaxies in the Milky Way’s neighborhood (within 250 million light years or so) to see if they have intermediate-size black holes at their centers. Moran also has a new three-year, $275,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation with which to do it.
According to Moran, black holes are actually rather mundane. He likes to point out that if the Sun collapsed into a black hole, aside from the loss of light, almost nothing would change. The Earth would still orbit the black hole-Sun just as it does now, because mass is all that matters in gravitational relationships—what the stuff actually is, is irrelevant. After all, a black hole is just an object whose mass is all concentrated in a single point of infinite density—called a singularity—and the space around it which is subject to its extremely strong gravitational pull.
Black holes are black because their intense gravitational fields make the light traveling in them turn back towards the center before it can escape. This means that no information can escape a black hole—hence the mysteriousness.
“The leading hypothesis for what’s going on is that galaxy collisions and mergers represent the common process by which both black holes and galaxies evolve,” Moran said.
For Moran, the discoveries have only increased, as his search for black holes at the centers of small galaxies has yielded early fruit. Utilizing new technology that allows him to study small galaxies with the necessary precision for the first time, Moran hopes that small galaxies and their black holes have the answer to a problem at the frontier of astronomy.
“Our goals are really to get a census of the black hole population in little galaxies as objectively as possible,” he said. “Almost as in psychology the sample that you use when you do some sort of test could have an influence on your results and how you interpret your results. The same thing happens in astronomy too.”
Astronomers have observed that the masses of supermassive black holes (millions or billions times the mass of the Sun) at the centers of large galaxies have a strong correlation to the characteristics of their home galaxies. This is odd, though, because black holes don’t interact much at all with their galaxies.
“I’m trying to understand how this correlation came to be,” Moran said. “This is a relatively new field of study.”
The answers are still forthcoming, but Moran’s research is on the frontier of our understanding of how galaxies evolve and how our universe came to be the way it is today.
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