The Martlet

Have you ever thought about what might lie in other galaxies? Kim Venn, an Associate Professor in UVic’s Physics and Astronomy Department has, and she’s using stars as tools to try and solve some of these big mysteries.

Venn, who is also a Canada Research chair, wants to search for clues about how our galaxy was formed by finding and observing stars containing relatively low amounts of metals. But while she says locating these ‘metal-poor’ stars is like find¬ing a needle in a haystack, Venn hopes new technology will help.

“If we have the right tool, we could double our chances of hitting it,” says Venn. “We’re looking for the oldest stars — so maybe the ones which formed when the galaxy formed. And that maybe tells you about the universe right after the Big Bang—how the universe formed.”

Venn and other astronomers hope that tool will be RAVEN, an optical instrument being designed by members of UVic’s Mechanical Engineering department. It was requested to be built for the Subaru telescope in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

“Suddenly there was an opportunity for this great science and telescope and engineering all involved together,” says Venn. “And we went for it — I’m excited about this because they got the grant to build RAVEN and I’ve put together a science case that I’m excited about.”

As Venn explains, RAVEN works by using a new technology in adaptive optics, the process in which astronomical observations are corrected for the visual distortion created by the Earth’s atmosphere. The new technology corrects two separate parts of the sky about five arc minutes (one-twelfth of one degree of sky) apart.

“This hasn’t been done before — people have only corrected one part of the sky and they’ve tried to make the area bigger and bigger, but that’s probably not the way the next-generation telescope will work,” says Venn. While Venn is trying to determine the story of how our own galaxy was formed, she notes every galaxy has its own unique story to tell.

“What I am specifically interested in is that every galaxy we can see has led an independent life — more or less. This means that every galaxy you look at has not been in contact with our galaxy,” says Venn. “So our galaxy had to go through its own generation of stars and star formation to form something like the sun, and then the sun formed planets and we live on this planet. But, what exactly did the chemistry have to be for it to make our sun? And to make something like our Earth that we live on?”

However, before Venn can get started on solving this mystery, RAVEN needs to be completed, which Venn believes will take about two years.

“It’s forefront science — we don’t know that it can be built; we don’t think there will be problems that we can’t work around; but you don’t know until you try, and when it’s right at the cutting edge, we just don’t know,” says Venn. “That’s pretty exciting, I think.”