There are a lot of stars to be seen in the South American skies, and Kathy Eastwood is on her way to becoming one of them.
Eastwood is director of the National Undergraduate Research Observatory for Northern Arizona University and Lowell Observatory, plus a recent Fulbright Award recipient. For her part of the Fulbright Award, Eastwood will travel to Chile in August to research and lecture at the University of La Serena and Cerra Tololo InterAmerican Observatory.
Fulbrights are granted to about 800 teachers across the United States each year. During the 2006 and 2007 academic year, according to a release issued from NAU, these 800 will travel to 150 countries.
Eastwood is one of two NAU professors granted the Fulbright Award this year. The traditional Fulbright program is sponsored by the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural affairs.
Eastwood will travel to La Serena in Chile to study massive stars. She also plans to conduct research at the Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory while on sabbatical from NAU.
All together, she plans to remain in Chile for about eight months.
Most massive stars, of the sort Eastwood studies, are not visible to the naked eye and many are only visible in the Southern Hemisphere. Big stars, according to Eastwood, are "inherently rare".
"Nature doesn't make many of them," said Eastwood.
South America and La Serena in particular, said Eastwood, are home to numerous observatories and a well-known destination for astronomers. Eastwood will teach a seminar course on observational astronomy and plans to do a little exploring while she's down there as well.
La Serena is Chile's second oldest city after Santiago. It was founded around 1543 to provide sea access between Lima and Santiago and is known for its beaches and mild climate.
Eastwood has been to Chile three times in the past, but in previous trips it was "only to use the telescopes," as she puts it. The layout of the stars surprised her when she arrived in South America.
"My favorite constellations were upside down," said Eastwood of her first trip to Chile.
"The first time I went down there was when Pinochet was in power," said Eastwood, who described men with machine guns and a general sense of uneasiness on that particular trip.
Chile today, she says, is a much calmer place. Eastwood and husband John Eastwood, economics lecturer at NAU, will travel to Chile together and have been learning Spanish before they leave.
"We were taking Spanish 101 at 8 in the morning last semester," said Eastwood.
The two plan to rent an apartment in La Serena and bike or bus to work.
"I've never traveled (to Chile) for fun," said Eastwood, whose research determines the mass of stars by measuring their orbit around one another. The star's orbit is dependent on the mutual gravitational forces between two stars and the gravitational forces are dependent on their mass. Theoretical models are then compared to her research, which determines whether or not the theories were modeled correctly. Her work is done in conjunction with collaborator Phil Massey of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.
"These are all stars that are too faint to be seen with the naked eye," said Eastwood. "Basically we're looking for kinds of stars that haven't been seen much before."
Patrick Whitehurst can be reached at whitehurst1@peoplepc.com.
