Spring 2022 University Professor - Dr. Robert Nemiroff

Changing my research focus, as a postdoc, from my PhD area of gravitational lensing to gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) was fortuitous – and a gamble. When I started as a postdoc at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, a person in my new postdoc group soon jumped ship and moved to nearby NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). I didn’t know him very well, but after a year he was building a group over at GSFC to study new NASA data coming in on GRBs – and invited me over to fill a postdoc position. I knew almost nothing about GRBs, but at his invitation I sat at the back of a small conference discussing some of the incoming NASA GRB data. What really struck me was that GRBs had so little known about them - but so much new data was coming in. And there was a some chance that GRBs might not only occur at cosmological distances – but they might be discovered to be cosmological with the new data.

The conundrum occurred when NRL countered the NASA postdoc offer with a “real job” – a staff position at NRL with job security. What should I do? I gambled and took the postdoc job at NASA. Luckily, GRBs turned out to be everything I was hoping for, and our new group was able to publish several papers showing the new data really was consistent with a cosmological GRB origin. That postdoc position at NASA also paved the way to a future position with job security – at Michigan Tech.

Some of my research is better grounded by my teaching, and the converse is also true: some of my teaching is better grounded in real-world physics by the research I do. 

Another field I have worked in is sky monitoring. At MTU, graduate students and I developed the first automated nighttime all-sky sky monitor with the idea of looking for transients and the variability of the brightest stars. Through a personal contact I had through GRBs, we got our first perch up on a little-used building at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona in 1999. To my surprise, few people were interested in our transient science – but many became interested in using our sky monitors (which we called CONCAMs) as cloud monitors. Now almost every major observatory on the planet has a similar all-sky monitor -- but they no longer get them from us. That’s because, in the past decade, many telescope manufacturers have started making these fisheye night sky monitors on their own. But major observatories are not the only ones who use these sky monitors. Last month I chanced upon a Facebook group called “Allsky Camera” which has 1,900 members. My new goal, though, is enable common smartphones to contribute to all-sky monitoring.

In general, the biggest challenge is the challenge of the biggest – the universe itself. We currently live in an exciting scientific epoch where technology has allowed humanity to see and learn more about the universe than ever before. But we find many things that we just don’t understand. The two biggest challenges, in my opinion, are dark matter and dark energy. Together they seem to make up more than 95 percent of the energy budget of the universe. But beyond their gravitational influence, we don’t know what they are. 

Michigan Tech is a wonderful home base. For one thing the high caliber of students, both graduate and undergraduate, is terrific.The freedom I have to work on speculative projects and follow my curiosity here is tremendously empowering. It is true that some of these speculative projects don’t work out – but, luckily enough, some do. Michigan Tech has been very supportive of my public outreach science projects as well. I don’t think many other organizations – including many other research-oriented universities -- would be so accommodating. 

My newest research effort is about relativistic illumination fronts. Some of this will be covered in my February lecture. Concurrently, I am nearing completion of a popular level book with the working title “Faster than Light: How Your Shadow Can Do It But You Cannot”. Writing the book has given me several new and speculative ideas for future research. The book is presently in need of beta-readers – people who read through the developing manuscript and provide useful comments in exchange for a mention in the book’s acknowledgments – and a free digital copy. If you like to read nonfiction, in particular nonfiction about science, and would like to help a MTU professor – please contact me!