A young woman visits Santa Fe, N.M., for a conference and sees the Milky Way for the first time. City lights and smog鈥攊n Hong Kong where she was born and California where she has recently lived鈥攈aven鈥檛 allowed her a naked-eye view. Faced with a beauty only clarity can bring, she feels a 鈥渢ogetherness with those far-away stars鈥� and decides on a career in cosmology.
Around the same time, in 1998, she admires astronomers and their 鈥渟tandard candle鈥� supernova discovery. The standard brightness from bursting stars enables astronomers to measure the stars鈥� distances, which can prove that the universe is expanding faster than the laws of physics were thought to allow. This discovery requires a look outside the galaxy because, like the city sky, the Milky Way is too bright.
Now that young woman, Shirley Ho, is an assistant professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon, a member of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III鈥檚 BOSS collaboration, and a member of the McWilliams Center. She and her teams have found their own standard measurement approach. She focuses on baryonic acoustic oscillations in deep space鈥擝ig Bang effects like ripples from a pebble dropped in a pond. A 鈥渇rozen ripple鈥� imprint can be observed, from a time when the universe cooled, in every single galaxy.
鈥淲e use that measurement to chart most precisely the distance away from us,鈥� she says. The research, though it may sound esoteric, could make our GPS systems more accurate, help us understand fusion for new energy possibilities, and even get us closer to answering: 鈥淲hy are we here?鈥濃�攁 question that has intrigued Ho since she was that stargazer.
For her research, she鈥檚 won the 2014 Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the , whose members include Nobel laureates and members of the National Academy.
鈥擩en Bannan (DC鈥�91)
