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Bob Hunter

IT WAS a fabulous year,
astronomers,
thernselves.

In February, the University of.

Toronto’s Jan Shelton happened to
be taking a long exposure of the
Large Magellanic Cloud when he
captured a picture of a supernova
going off.

Actually, it had gone off
170,000 years ago. But the light of
its explosion was just reaching
Earth when Shelton turned on the
10-inch telescope camera at Chile’s
massive Las Campanas obser-
vatory, and caught the moment
when a star died. {

Or did he catch the moment
when a star was born? These are
the very questions which can now
be studied in detail, thanks to
Shelton's find.

It was the brightest supernova to
occur in nearly 400 years. More to
the point, it was the’ first to be
photographed. Basically,
astronomers have been allowed a
glimpse of the most fundamental
act of creation as it happened.

It is from such stellar explosions
that cosmic rays’ come, which
cause mutations in terrestrial or-
ganisms and which therefore play a
key role in the evoiution of life.

Possibly , even more profound i is
the role of a supernova in the for-
mation of the basic elements of the
universe, spewed outward’ in
clouds,of gas and dust. |

The planets and any life on them
— you and me included — consist
of elements forged in a supernova,

‘But Shelton wasn’t alone in’

shaking up the astronomical com-
munity with a monumental
/ discovery it’1987. ;

In November, West Van-
couver-born Brent Tully, a UBC
graduate ‘working at the University
of Hawaii’s Institute of
Astronomy, announced that he
had ‘discovered something even
more Awesome, if you can believe
if

He? called it the Pisces-Cetus
Supercluster Complex.

In/the last decade, scientists had
used computers to figure out that
our own ‘galaxy was part of a
supercluster of several galaxies.
The apparently vast distances be-
tween ours and these other galaxies
/was nothing, compared with the

/ distance between all. of us put

/ together and the next supercluster.

Galaxies, it turns. out, even
though there are hundreds of mil-
lions of stars in ‘them, are mere
islands in a nebulous archipelago
spread across infinity.

a couple of whom became

® strictly personal @

oddly enough, for Canadian
superstars

Astronomer Tully has taken the
notion of island galaxies a cosmic
step further than it had ever gone
before.

Using a supercomputer, he con-
structed a three-dimensional map
of our ‘‘Jocal supercluster’’ in rela-
tion to about 60 other
superclusters, and found that,
taken together, we form a part of
yet another level of ‘‘islands’’ — a
supercluster complex.

This complex is 100 times more
massive than any other known
structure or formation in the uni-
verse, and is composed of millions
of galaxies, covering 10 per cent of
the observable universe.

This new picture of
astrophysical reality tells us much
about where we fit in the scheme
of things, but it also challenges
conventional theories about how
the galaxies are formed.

In case you were wondering,
fellow citizens of the Pisces-Cetus
Supercluster Complex, our local

supercluster is known as the Virgo
Cluster, and it consists of some
2,500 galaxies.

No, | don’t know the area code.

Tully's discovery fit in nicely
with the findings of the American
Physical Society, published in
May, which noted that, along with
the relatively-adjacent Hydra-
Centaurus Supercluster, we are
drifting — or falling or being pull-
ed or shoved — toward something
called, for lack of .a better name,
the ‘‘Great Attractor,’’ meaning a
massive coagulation of interstellar
systems.

A likely third major discovery
was announced in June by a Ca-
nadian, this time Bruce Campbell
of the Dominion Astronomical
Observatory near Victoria, who
told a conference at UBC that he
had detected the probable presence
of ‘‘planet-like’’ objects around
two stars, and their possible
presence around five others.

Using a high-precision observing
technique at the Canada-France-
Hawaii telescope atop Mauna Kea
volcano, Campbell said that, along
with UBC astronomer Stephenson
Yan, he was able to come up with
the first hard evidence that planets
are indeed orbiting other stars than
our own.

That’s quite a giddy catch of
data from the skies for one year.

Any one of these finds or prob-
able finds would make 1987 a
landmark year in astronomical his-
tory:

It seems rather picayune to even
mention the nationality of the
astronomers involved, eh?

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