A stargazer since elementary school, Steven Majewski makes no apologies for
his love of pure science. But when he was a shaggy-haired graduate student
in the early 1990s, he found other astronomers didn't take him seriously when
he first talked about stars at the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy rotating
backwards.
As a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, Majewski
compared 17-year-old photographs of the sky, taken by his dissertation advisor,
Richard Kron, with current photos that he took himself. Using a precise
measuring machine, a microdensitometer, Majewski found that the most distant
stars were rotating around our galaxy backwards.
Although he had an article published in the Astrophysical Journal
in 1992, it wasn't until older, more established astronomers from the
University of North Carolina and Michigan State University published similar
findings in 1995 that Majewski was given credit for his research results.
Now, recognition is paying off by helping him raise funds to
further his research. Last fall, the assistant professor won nearly $1 million
in research funds for his path-breaking work on the formation of the Milky
Way. He was awarded a $455,000 CAREER Award from the National Science
Foundation and a $500,000 Packard Award, one of only three ever won by U.Va.
professors.
For Majewski, the quest to understand the origin of the Milky Way
is part of the natural human need to understand where we come from, he said.
"The formation of galaxies is a big step in the chain of events
leading from the origin of the universe through the formation of stars and
planets, and, ultimately, life. Pondering our origins backwards along this
chain leads us naturally to the question of how galaxies like the Milky Way
arose out of the primordial soup of the Big Bang. And because one can look up
into dark skies and see its diffuse glow so plainly, throughout history
civilizations have sought explanations for this milky band across the heavens,"
he said.
For the past half-century, astronomers have believed that the Milky
Way began as a cloud of gas that, through the force of gravity, condensed into
a galaxy about 25 times smaller. Under the old theory, the speed of rotation
differed, but all the stars in the Milky Way spun in the same direction.
"My proposal was that perhaps the inner parts of the Milky Way did
follow the 1962 model. But the outer parts, rather than being involved in the
collapse that formed the inner Milky Way, may have been acquired later through
the cannibalization of other galaxies. This would account for backward-rotating
stars, because stars in a small galaxy moving past the Milky Way in a backward
direction would continue to rotate in that direction even after the powerful
gravitational pull of the Milky Way shredded the galaxy and absorbed its
entrails."
The recently awarded Packard funds will allow Majewski to continue
traveling to Chile to work with the Carnegie Institute telescopes at Las
Campanas. The award will also support collaboration with a theorist at Princeton
University to develop a computer model of the cannibalization process and
enable Majewski to hire some post-doctoral research assistants, as well as pay
for high-speed computers.
Each year, the presidents of 50 select universities nominate two
young scientists from each of their institutions for the David and Lucille
Packard Foundation fellowships. Then a panel of distinguished scientists selects
20 fellows to receive individual grants of $100,000 annually for five
consecutive years. NSF's CAREER program supports young scientists in pursuing
their educational and research objectives. Funding runs from $200,000 to
$500,000 over a four- to five-year period.