{"id":108188,"date":"2017-06-08T13:55:21","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T17:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=108188"},"modified":"2017-11-03T14:27:06","modified_gmt":"2017-11-03T18:27:06","slug":"look-what-we-found-aleksandar-diamond-stanics-spectroscopic-plug-plate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2017\/06\/08\/look-what-we-found-aleksandar-diamond-stanics-spectroscopic-plug-plate\/","title":{"rendered":"Look What We Found: Aleks Diamond-Stanic’s plate with 1,400 holes"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the window sill of his third-floor Carnegie Science office, Assistant Professor of Physics Aleks Diamond-Stanic has a large aluminum plate peppered with 1,400 tiny holes.<\/p>\n

As he\u2019s crossing campus, Diamond-Stanic can spot the disc from the courtyard between Coram and Ladd libraries. He\u2019s also able to see it from a walkway that passes Hedge. Sometimes he pauses, looks past a couple of trees that partially block the view, and thinks, \u201cThere\u2019s my office!\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s nice to know about the view, but what about the plate? While it looks like a crazy pizza screen, Diamond-Stanic\u2019s plate was once used by astronomers with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, based at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, to collect spectra from objects throughout the universe.<\/p>\n

\"170607_Physics_Object_Diamond_Stanic_0245\"<\/a>Each night, the SDSS uses different plates to measure a small part of the night sky, about the size of one\u2019s palm stretched out at arm\u2019s length. Each hole in the plate \u2014 corresponding to an object in space, such as a star or galaxy \u2014 has an optical fiber plugged into it to measure the object\u2019s spectrum.<\/p>\n

After the mapping is done, the plates are distributed by request to scientists and educators. The SDSS has used thousands of spectroscopic plug plates in its 14-year history.<\/p>\n

Diamond-Stanic says the plate symbolizes a connection between his work at Bates and SDSS, a multinational collaboration among dozens of institutions that is creating three-dimensional maps of the universe with unprecedented detail.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is our piece of the larger effort,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s a real scientific piece of equipment that was used to obtain the kind of data that our undergraduate researchers work with at Bates.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fall 2016, Bates joined the SDSS as an associate institutional member. \u201cWe get access to proprietary data that is a big part of what we\u2019re working on with the students in our Galaxies Lab this summer,\u201d Diamond-Stanic says.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s talking about the Bates Astrophysics Galaxy Evolution Lab. The \u201cBAGEL,\u201d as he calls it, uses datasets from telescopes on Earth and in space to study the interactions of gas within galaxies \u2014 how gas forms stars and fuels the growth of supermassive black holes within galaxies, and how energy and momentum from massive stars and black holes expels gas from galaxies.<\/p>\n

In April, Diamond-Stanic took three student researchers \u2014 Kwamae Delva \u201918, Eve Cinquino \u201919, and Jose Ruiz \u201918 \u2014 to the Apache Point Observatory. There, they designed and executed their own program using the observatory\u2019s 3.5 meter telescope.<\/p>\n

This summer, Diamond-Stanic has a team of nine Bates students working on three projects, each driven by \u201cdata from that same mountaintop.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While it looks like a pizza screen, the plate was used by astronomers to collect spectra from objects throughout the universe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":108190,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,1,130,217,11009],"tags":[11368,96,11321],"class_list":["post-108188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-batesnews","category-collaboration","category-science-technology","category-the-college","tag-aleksandar-diamond-stanic","tag-astronomy","tag-look-what-we-found"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108188"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108262,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108188\/revisions\/108262"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}