Black Holes Bring Filipina An Award

"Astronomy and Astrophysics are rich and exciting fields that offer plenty of opportunities for young scientists to contribute. Master the basics, keep up with the latest discoveries, don't stop asking questions and finding the answers,"

-Reinabelle Reyes

Reinabelle Reyes, a 24-year-old astrophysicist, was given the "Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award" at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January. She was given the award in line with her major role in the discovery of the largest number of "super massive" black holes in the center of galaxies, hidden by obscured quasars.

Reyes is a DOST scholar who graduated valedictorian from the Philippine Science High School in 2001, and 4 years later graduated in Ateneo de Manila, as summa cum laude with a Physics degree. She then took her masterals in Particle physics at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. Reyes is now a candidate for Ph.D in astrophysics, at the Princeton University in New Jersey.

Her 1st task at Princeton was to "figure out" how rare these black holes were. This is quite a difficult task since blackholes are considered invisible. She, in fact, described the project as looking for a needle in a haystack.

She was assigned to a group headed by Nadia Zakamska, a long-term postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, and under the supervision of "quasar hunter" professor Michael Strauss. The group found 900 black holes.

MyNASA

There is a new way to access NASA pages and keep track of what you wish to view. NASA has a personal user account called mynasa. You can access the page by typing mynasa.nasa.gov

MYNASA allows you different features to make your research of space related articles easier. And, the links from the home page are credible, so you don't have to go checking around in all the different sites to check if the posted information is wrong.

Your default account would contain a NASA calendar (with current events), a panel where you can save NASA videos, a panel where you can view bookmarked news, and panels that update you with different news such as the solar system, planet earth, and technology.

The mynasa account is simple and it does not require any personal info since you wouldn't be allowed to post items. I've been using it for researching articles from NASA. Try it. ^_^

Stargazers blog

Greetings.
Welcome to the Stargazers blog. Here we can have more interactive communication and discussions with regards to astronomy. I hope that you would be able to contribute to the blog. Thanks guys and happy star gazing.