Gov. Jim Justice (R-WV) recognizes two astrophysicists at West Virginia University for their research and accomplishments.
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NewsTranscript
00:00And he did this, he did this because he wanted to come and recognize our two honorees today,
00:09but also to recognize the university.
00:11And we really appreciate that.
00:13You know, our governor has been a steadfast supporter of higher education.
00:18And for that, I'm very grateful.
00:21And I know that will continue as we move into the new session.
00:27I want to recognize the fact that we have a speaker in the house here also, Roger Henshaw.
00:32So we have been very blessed to have leadership out of both the House and the Senate.
00:38And for that, we're grateful.
00:40So today, what we're here doing is we're here recognizing the fact that we have two world-class faculty members at our university.
00:48Mara McLaughlin, the defendant's law offender.
00:51Mara was just nominated and will be initiated into the National Academy of Science,
01:00which is the highest honor given in science in this country.
01:04And she, by the way, is the first to receive that award as a member of our university family.
01:10So this is very special for us.
01:13And then Duncan, who happens to be British, is being initiated into the Royal Academy.
01:21Is it of London?
01:23Royal Society of London.
01:25Well, I knew you got it right.
01:27Royal Society of London, which is the very same recognition as Mara in this country.
01:33So the two of them are achieving great things and being so recognized.
01:38But today, we're also celebrating the fact that they, together, won the Shock Prize,
01:43which is an international prize that recognizes the best of astrophysics and science.
01:50And many people call it the Nobel Prize, at least.
01:55It is a remarkable, remarkable achievement.
01:59And they have done all of this while they are here at this institution.
02:03They've brought great recognition to the state.
02:06They've brought international recognition to the university.
02:09And they've brought a great sense of place and purpose to our university.
02:15By the way, they have an entering freshman that is going to the university also.
02:19So we always love to wish them any parents on top of everything else.
02:22So in saying that, Governor, thank you for being here.
02:27And we appreciate the fact that you've become an honor to our very best.
02:32That's really good.
02:33We should all applaud our great president and our speaker.
02:38But the work that these two rascals are doing out here are unbelievable.
02:42So please, let's listen.
02:52Thank you so much.
02:53Thank you.
02:54It is a huge honor to have you here.
02:57It's also a huge honor to have Speaker Hanschel here.
03:00President Gee, it's always a pleasure to see you.
03:02And thank you so much for coming and introducing us.
03:05And welcome to all of your staff.
03:09And thank you for all the faculty and students who've come today to be here and share this with us.
03:15It's really special.
03:18So Baby Dog isn't here.
03:21Well, I left her in the car out there.
03:23The reason I did is she's pretty hot.
03:25We have some dog cookies for Baby Dog.
03:29Labeled with our Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology stickers.
03:34We have a few things for you about the work that's ongoing in our department.
03:40So we just have a few remarks.
03:42Less than ten minutes or so.
03:44No long scientific lecture or speech.
03:48We just wanted to start by thanking the university and the state for all the investments
03:54that have made our work possible over the years.
03:57We came here 18 years ago.
04:00President Gee mentioned our son.
04:03He's right there.
04:04He was a baby when we came here.
04:06And he's now going to be an entering freshman at WVU.
04:09I can hardly believe that it has been that long.
04:13When we first came here, Earl Seamy was the chair of the department.
04:17He brought us in.
04:19There was one astronomy faculty member here, Jack Littleton.
04:23But there was no astronomy research program and no graduate program in astronomy.
04:28Which was very surprising given the proximity of the Green Bank Telescope.
04:32Which was the largest steerable radio telescope in the world.
04:37And still is.
04:39So it was a wonderful opportunity for us.
04:42The first few years were tough.
04:44We kind of had to develop all the courses and teach all the courses.
04:49But now we have seven astronomy faculty, 15 graduate students, postdocs,
04:56a whole bunch of undergraduates doing research.
04:59And we have joined very competitive research programs in condensed matter physics,
05:03plasma physics, and physics education research.
05:06There's a lot of amazing things going on in the department.
05:09And I hope you can take time to read.
05:11There's a newsletter in there which summarizes the past year of accomplishments.
05:15There are so many faculty, some of them in this room,
05:17who have been honored with a number of awards.
05:21And are making really great research impacts throughout the world.
05:30So I think Doug's going to tell us a little bit about the story of FRBs and the Shaw Prize.
05:34And I'll just preface it by saying that one nice thing about building up a new program
05:39is we have a lot of freedom to do whatever we wanted.
05:44And so we could kind of undertake kind of like high risk, high reward type science,
05:49which I think is what the Fast Radio Burst search sort of epitomizes.
05:54Yeah, absolutely.
05:56And thank you, Maura, and thank you, Governor Justice, for coming today.
05:59It's great to be here with our friends and colleagues and students in the room as well.
06:05As Maura said, we had kind of a blank slate and freedom to do what we wanted,
06:10which was wonderful for us.
06:13One of the first things we did was we engaged undergraduate students in research,
06:18undergraduate students as well.
06:20We had an undergraduate student working on a particular project,
06:23and at the time they were looking at data from the Magellanic Clouds.
06:29The Magellanic Clouds are our nearest neighboring galaxies.
06:32They're relatively close by astronomical standards, only 160,000 light years away.
06:38They're just outside the edge of the Milky Way.
06:41Anyway, we got excited about those because a few years before that,
06:45Maura had found a population of pulsars, which she'll tell us a little bit about in a minute,
06:52in the Milky Way through a new technique that was just looking at individual radio pulses,
06:58like the kind that we can detect with Green Bank.
07:01The data that we had, though, were from the Southern Hemisphere,
07:04so you can't see the Magellanic Clouds from here.
07:08It's from a telescope in Australia.
07:10We got a copy of the data and started looking at it for these pulsars.
07:17A few months in, the student found this amazingly bright signal.
07:22It was so bright it actually saturated the equipment.
07:27We almost sort of missed it.
07:29Anyway, we saw this signal and quickly realized that it wasn't actually coming from the Magellanic Clouds at all.
07:36It was coming from much further away, about 3 billion light years,
07:40so halfway across the universe, a good fraction of the size of the universe.
07:45We kind of really just stumbled upon something entirely new.
07:50We've been studying pulsars for many years.
07:53We've kind of just been in our own galaxy.
07:57Now we're suddenly out into the universe.
08:00It was just an amazing, amazing time.
08:03We've been part of this community now where there's hundreds of people around the world,
08:08many of our colleagues in this department and students,
08:12but also colleagues around the world that are participating in this research.
08:17The great promise is we don't know what fast radio bursts are yet,
08:21but we think that they are coming from neutron stars from across the universe.
08:31Even if we don't fully understand what they will be,
08:34we can use them to map out the distribution of mass across the universe.
08:39That has a much broader significance than just the astronomers themselves.
08:44It really gets to fundamental physics.
08:47That was the recognition that we got for the Shaw Prize.
08:51We were just so overwhelmed to get that last year.
08:57It was just a wonderful surprise.
09:00We're just so grateful for the support.
09:03We would like to show a short clip on the dome.
09:09Before we do that, though, not quite yet.
09:13Sorry.
09:14I'm just going to give a couple minute short science intro to what you'll see on the dome.
09:21Most of my time since I've been here at WVU
09:24has been actually spent studying something kind of related to fast radio bursts, but different.
09:30I'm co-director of a physics frontier center called NANOGRAV,
09:35which stands for the North American Nanogrids Observatory for Gravitational Waves.
09:39What we are doing is we are using compact remnants of supernova explosions,
09:46which emit radio waves and spin very precisely and very rapidly
09:50so that they act like cosmic clocks in space.
09:53We're observing a network of these with the Green Bank Telescope and other telescopes,
09:57and we're looking for very tiny deviations in the arrival times of the pulses from these cosmic clocks
10:03due to gravitational waves that are stretching and squeezing space-time.
10:06I know this sounds crazy, like very esoteric science,
10:11but we had a very exciting result just about a year ago, actually.
10:16It was June 29th of last year when we announced the discovery of these low-frequency gravitational waves.
10:22Basically, what we saw with our telescopes is that space-time is not static.
10:27The space that we're sitting in right now is rippling with these low-frequency waves.
10:34The distances between us are changing all the time because these gravitational waves are passing through space.
10:41We're basically in a sea of these invisible gravitational waves that Einstein predicted.
10:47Anyway, so this was really exciting.
10:49The discovery is just the first step, though.
10:51What we're trying to do now with the work of this Physics Frontier Center is figure out where the waves are coming from.
10:57We think they're coming from very massive black holes, like billions of times the mass of the sun,
11:02orbiting each other in very distant galaxies.
11:06We're going to learn a lot about how our universe was formed, how galaxies have come together through cosmic time.
11:14We have a lot of funding for this Physics Frontier Center.
11:19By the way, there's only 10 of these in the country.
11:23Ours is composed of about 20 institutions throughout the United States.
11:27Last year, we asked for a supplement from our Physics Frontier Center
11:31because we wanted to make a planetarium show about the work of the international collaboration that is undertaking this experiment.
11:41Susie is going to play the trailer for this planetarium show.
11:50Around the world, powerful radio telescopes are pointed at extraordinary objects scattered throughout our galaxy.
11:55An international team of astronomers are sharing their resources
11:59and have set their sights on creating the most sensitive detector of low-frequency gravitational waves using pulsars.
12:07They're essentially like these zombie stars that are formed when stars bigger than our sun go supernova at the end of their lifetime.
12:14Super dense, super highly magnetized objects that move incredibly fast, many hundreds of times a second.
12:22They are incredibly stable rotations, beams of radiation that are coming out of each magnetic pole,
12:28and as those beams pass into our fields of view, when we're, say, pointing a telescope at it, we see a pulse.
12:35Pulsars have been studied extensively since their discovery over 60 years ago.
12:39With their extreme and unique properties, pulsars are being used to probe ripples in the fabric of space-time.
12:45Learn more in Cosmic Clocks, a film from the West Virginia University Planetarium, out this fall.
12:53And just a short aside, both of the female students that you saw in that video, Olivia Young and Lulu Aghazi,
13:02they're both from West Virginia, they both did their undergraduate studies here,
13:06and they are both on their way to PhDs in astrophysics, as we see.
13:14So I guess I'll just wrap things up from our side.
13:18Now that you've learned a little bit about pulsars and neutron stars,
13:23when we were getting the Shaw Prize last November and I was sitting on the podium,
13:29and I looked a bit at the medal that we have here.
13:32We've got these amazing gold medals, and I was thinking, wow, the gold that this is made from
13:38was produced in the supernova explosions of the objects that we're studying.
13:45And it suddenly had this big connection from things very far away to something right in our hands.
13:50So it was an amazing moment, but none of it really would be possible
13:55without the support of the tax dollars that appear as citizens in West Virginia, but across the U.S.,
14:03paid by state and federal agencies.
14:06Literally all of the funded research that goes on, not only in this department, but around the university,
14:12depends upon that, and we're just so grateful for all of that continued support.
14:17So every opportunity I get to thank the taxpayers is a big one for me.
14:23So thank you, everyone, for all of your support.
14:37I'm going to keep this.
14:42Mish, maybe don't read that.
14:47This is unbelievable.
14:54Well, let me just say just a few words, okay?
14:57And I'll be very short and quick.
15:02The work you do, all of it, the influence that you have on the students that are here,
15:09the influence you have on your colleagues, the work that you do,
15:15absolutely is the reason we have higher ed, the reason we have universities,
15:23the reason we challenge each other in this world every day.
15:27It's what we do and everything.
15:29And in all honesty, your intelligence is off the chart of anything that I could ever even get remotely close to.
15:41But with all that being said, thank God for you in every way,
15:46because what you do is you bring us closer and closer and closer to solutions
15:53and answers that will propel us beyond belief.
15:58It's what you do.
15:59I mean, it is amazing.
16:01And so from the standpoint of our great president, our great speaker,
16:06the governor who's just an ordinary guy that loves our state
16:10and absolutely believes in our state and believes in our people,
16:14with all that being said, just think, the guy that's sitting here is your governor right now.
16:20His grandparents never had indoor plumbing.
16:23And in all honesty, what do we do?
16:26We work.
16:27We work.
16:28We challenge.
16:29We absolutely continue to solve and come up with answers
16:34and absolutely then it provides opportunity.
16:37So I mean it when I tell you that you should be very, very proud.
16:42The governor has the opportunity to do just this,
16:46and that is to give away the highest honor that I can possibly give away.
16:51And so for Mara and for Duncan, I have them right here.
16:56But I'm giving you guys the Distinguished West Virginians Award.
17:01With all that being said, this award, and I'm going to go with Mara first.
17:11This award basically is just saying exactly that.
17:16But the thing that you don't know is this.
17:19I've probably now given away close to 20 of these in almost eight years now.
17:27I don't give these away like candy.
17:30That's all there is to it.
17:32I give these to very, very, very special accomplishments and very special people.
17:38So from my standpoint, it's the highest honor that I can possibly give you.
17:43And absolutely what I am really telling you, for your son, for everybody that's here,
17:48I am telling you thank you.
17:51Thank you for absolutely making us better in every way.
17:56So, Mara, that's yours.
17:58Thank you.
18:12Bless you, bless you.
18:14So I think everyone is going to want to get pictures here.
18:17But, Governor, thank you very much.
18:19I want to get a picture with you.
18:23And this unbelievable sport cap.
18:27Listen, I love this man beyond good sense.
18:30And I am telling you, honest to goodness, we will miss him like you can't imagine.
18:35He literally loves this incredible university and loves all of you.
18:40He really does.
18:41Thank you, my friend.
18:42So let's all recognize that this is a very unusual recognition.
18:49As you said, you give it out very infrequently.
18:52And it's only to those who have made a difference.
18:54They have devoted themselves to astronomy and astrophysics,
18:58but they also have devoted themselves to West Virginia.
19:01And I think that is what is incredibly important.
19:05So thank you for being here, everyone.
19:06Thank you for being here.
19:08And, Mara, come on up here, you and Duncan.
19:11Let's get some pictures taken.
19:20Good morning.
19:22That's great.
19:49So thank you, everyone, for coming.
19:51We are grateful for you.