Prof. Frank Winkler Receives NASA Research Funding
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Professor Emeritus of Physics Frank Winkler has been awarded funding from the NASA-funded Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) for his role in a collaborative research project titled “What Makes Radio-detected and Optically-detected Supernova Remnants in NGC6946 Different.”
The project, carried out with colleagues from STScI, Johns Hopkins University, and Hofstra University, will use new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, in conjunction with existing data from Hubble, from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, from optical telescopes at Kitt Peak in Arizona and Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and from the Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico.
The study will focus on understanding the remnants of exploded stars in the “Fireworks Galaxy,” so named because it has produced more supernovae (9) in the past century than any other known galaxy. The researchers hope that their work will shed new light on the cycle through which stars are born, live, die spectacularly as supernovae, and disperse matter that will eventually become the raw material for new stars.