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MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Assistant Professor of Physics Eilat Glikman has been awarded a grant from NASA for observations using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), which is a telescope carried by a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft developed by NASA and the German Space Agency.

Glikman’s two-year research project titled “Spectral Energy Distributions of Red Quasars” involves collaborators from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Yale University, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the University of California San Diego, and the Leibniz Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany.

The investigation will involve the study of spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of a sample of dust-reddened quasars and is the follow-up to the results from the summer research of two undergraduates — a Middlebury physics major and a Swarthmore student who was part of the Keck Northeast Astronomy Consortium Research Experience for Undergraduates program— working in Dr. Glikman’s lab in 2016.

SOFIA is the only facility able to observe theses SEDs, due to its sensitivity at long wavelengths requiring observations at high altitudes, and the data will produce a clearer picture of the complex process of quasar/galaxy co-evolution.