The first of our new faculty is Eric Sandquist, who joined the department this past September. A native of Maryland, Eric earned a degree in physics with a minor in astronomy from the University of Virginia. The only way to understand what is happening inside a star is to create a mathematical version and run simulations, an exacting process with many demands on both people and their machines. Since receiving his doctorate, Eric has been at Northwestern University on a post-doctoral fellowship. Eric began to work with globular clusters, which are dense spherical groupings of hundreds of thousands of stars found in the Milky Way and many other galaxies.
Globular clusters are very old and their stars seem to have been formed at about the same time.
SDSU has developed a stellar laboratory where we can observe the effects of stellar mass on the rate at which the stars evolve. This laboratory will be of great use to Eric in his continued studies of two of the globular clusters, M5 and M30. Eric has discovered an anomaly in M30 which needs more attention, and a future report will explore this in detail. We are currently interviewing candidates for next Fall, and expect to hire yet another new astronomer to fill the position created by the retirement of Art Young this summer. Department Research Allen Shafter is continuing his studies of novae in nearby galaxies.