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>>Theresa Bierer: Flagstaff is well known for its research on Pluto, what many people
don't know is that Pluto has thousands of neighbors in a region of our solar system
called the Kuiper Belt. It's Dr. Stephen Tegler's specialty. On this next Inside NAU science
segment the professor of physics and astronomy is standing inside the dome of Lowell Observatory
seventy two inch telescope on anderson mesa. >>Stephen Tegler: I'm Stephen Tegler an astronomer
at Northern Arizona University and I work on the Kuiper Belt. Back in 1930 at Lowell
Observatory by Tombaugh discovered Pluto and very shortly thereafter it became very apparent
that it wasn't very big and so there is a pattern in the solar system, there is four
small rocky planets going out ward: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. Followed by four very
large plants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and then tiny little Pluto, so it's
size, its small size, its eccentric orbit was very puzzling to astronomers. And then
in the 1950 an astronomer here, again in Arizona University of Arizona, Gerard Kuiper postulated
that there was a swarm of icy planetesimals at and beyond Pluto. And so from 1950 to 1990
that was just a theory and in 1992 the first Kuiper Belt object was discovered. What the
Kuiper Belt is is an icy reservoir of building blocks of planets. And so what we have now
is an opportunity, is a thousand notes, we have an opportunity to understand how you
build a planet by looking at the preserved building blocks that are still there. A colleague
of mine refers to looking at these images as looking at carpet stains. They are small
black dots on a grey background the dots basically giving us a measure on how bright they are.
The most recent run was on the six and a half meter MMT telescope on Mount Hopkins here
in Arizona. And there on a good night we'll observe maybe half a dozen objects in the
course of a night. So what we do at the beginning of a night, just before sunset, we'll show
up at the telescope and we'll meet the telescope operator there, who actually is the one in
charge of the telescope, who actually decides when to open, when to close and has complete
control over the facility. At sunset we rotate the telescope dome and open the slit to such
a position that it's optimum for the initial calibration measurements, before we begin
to make our actual scientific measurements. And very shortly thereafter the sun gets down
and it becomes dark enough that we can begin scientific operations. We don't do large numbers
per night, they are very very faint, even now with brighter ones being discovered it's
a very painstaking, time consuming process. It's taken us about 10 years to do about a
hundred objects. One of the things that is not very well known is that learning how to
become a scientist is not just textbooks, homework and exams, that's important and those
are important skills to learn, but to become a scientist you actually learn that by apprenticeship.
At Northern Arizona University we have a close interaction between the faculty and students
on research projects. They publish papers and go to telescopes and go to meetings and
they participate in all the steps that are required for a professional scientist. I mean
one of the best parts of my job is going to a telescope and you never know what you may
fine, now most times nothing of real interest, nothing of real significance will comes up.
But if you're lucky in your career you'll actually discover something that no one else
has seen before and it's pretty significant and that is the quest that I think that brings
us all to the telescope and stay up all night, is exploring our surroundings, exploring the
universe. >>Bierer: Find out about the research at Northern
Arizona University, check us out online.