Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton (AAAP) Monthly Meeting
First Star Formation and the Lunar Ultimately Large Telescope.
Dr. Schauer’s research focuses on the high-redshift Universe, running hydrodynamic, cosmological simulations to study the first stars and black holes. She studies large-scale effects that influence “minihalos,” the early building blocks of galaxies. By investigating these first objects, she aims to understand how the Universe through successive generations of stars and supernovae underwent the transition from metal-free to metal-enriched. Capturing the light from objects so long ago and far away will take extraordinary instrumentation, and to that end Dr. Schauer is looking forward to observations using what she and her colleagues are calling the “Ultimately Large Telescope.” They hope to revive a design proposed by Roger Angel and collaborators that described a 20-meter telescope (shown below) with a mirror of rotating liquid operating on the Moon. Dr. Schauer and colleagues believe that a 100-meter instrument is feasible, with which they could study the first stars that formed in the Universe, the so-called Population III stars.