Interview with Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky has published nineteen volumes of poetry and prose, including a translation of Dante\u27s Inferno, He served as U. S. Poet Laureate from 1997-2000, has won countless awards, and has been nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He\u27s taught on both coasts and in Chicago, and was called the last of the \u27civic\u27 or public poets by the Poetry Foundation. His work has the meticulous, meditative beauty of a Japanese garden and the deliberate wit of an American East-coast native. As Poet Laureate, Pinsky started the Favorite Poem Project, a public-outreach effort that convinced 18,000 Americans to share their favorite poem during a one-year open call for submissions in the late 1990s. That project now sponsors an annual week-long summer institute for teachers, with a focus on poetry as an out-loud art form. He believes this continuing effort to keep poetry in the American consciousness is far more important than the title he held as Poet Laureate

ALMA Observations of Giant Molecular Clouds in the Starburst Dwarf Galaxy Henize 2-10

We present new ${ }^{12}$CO(J=1-0) observations of Henize 2-10, a blue compact dwarf galaxy about 8.7 Mpc away, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array. These are the highest spatial and spectral resolution observations, to date, of the molecular gas in this starburst galaxy. We measure a molecular mass of $1.2\times10^8 M_\odot$ in Henize 2-10, and most of the molecular gas is contained within a region having a size of about 310 pc. We use the CPROPS algorithm to identify 119 resolved giant molecular clouds distributed throughout the galaxy, and the molecular gas contained within these clouds make up between 45 to 70% of the total molecular mass. The molecular clouds in Henize 2-10 have similar median sizes (~26 pc), luminous masses (~$4\times 10^5$ $M_\odot$), and surface densities (~$180$ $M_\odot$ pc$^{-2}$) to Milky Way clouds. We provide evidence that Henize 2-10 clouds tend to be in virial equilibrium, with the virial and luminous masses scaling according to $M_{vir}\propto M_{lum}^{1.2\pm0.1}$, similar to clouds in the Milky Way. However, we measure a scaling relationship between luminous mass and size, $M_{vir}\propto R^{3.0\pm0.3}$, that is steeper than what is observed in Milky Way clouds. Assuming Henize 2-10 molecular clouds are virialized, we infer values of the CO-to-H$_2$ conversion factor ranging from 0.5 to 13 times the standard value in the Solar Neighborhood. Given star formation efficiencies as low as 5%, the most massive molecular clouds in Henize 2-10 currently have enough mass to form the next generation of super-star clusters in the galaxy

A New Approach to Developing Interactive Software Modules Through Graduate Education

Educational technology has attained significant importance as a mechanism for supporting experiential learning of science concepts. However, the growth of this mechanism is limited by the significant time and technical expertise needed to develop such products, particularly in specialized fields of science. We sought to test whether interactive, educational, online software modules can be developed effectively by students as a curriculum component of an advanced science course. We discuss a set of 15 such modules developed by Harvard University graduate students to demonstrate various concepts related to astronomy and physics. Their successful development of these modules demonstrates that online software tools for education and outreach on specialized topics can be produced while simultaneously fulfilling project-based learning objectives. We describe a set of technologies suitable for module development and present in detail four examples of modules developed by the students. We offer recommendations for incorporating educational software development within a graduate curriculum and conclude by discussing the relevance of this novel approach to new online learning environments like edX.Astronom

Gathering dust : A galaxy-wide study of dust emission from cloud complexes in NGC 300

© 2018 ESO. Reproduced with permission from Astronomy & Astrophysics. Content in the UH Research Archive is made available for personal research, educational, and non-commercial purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, all content is protected by copyright, and in the absence of an open license, permissions for further re-use should be sought from the publisher, the author, or other copyright holder.Aims. We use multi-band observations by the Herschel Space Observatory to study the dust emission properties of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 300. We compile a first catalogue of the population of giant dust clouds (GDCs) in NGC 300, including temperature and mass estimates, and give an estimate of the total dust mass of the galaxy. Methods. We carried out source detection with the multiwavelength source extraction algorithm getsources. We calculated physical properties, including mass and temperature, of the GDCs from five-band Herschel PACS and SPIRE observations from 100 to 500 μm; the final size and mass estimates are based on the observations at 250 μm that have an effective spatial resolution of ~170 pc. We correlated our final catalogue of GDCs to pre-existing catalogues of HII regions to infer the number of GDCs associated with high-mass star formation and determined the Hα emission of the GDCs. Results. Our final catalogue of GDCs includes 146 sources, 90 of which are associated with known HII regions. We find that the dust masses of the GDCs are completely dominated by the cold dust component and range from ~1.1 × 10 3 to 1.4 × 10 4 M. The GDCs have effective temperatures of ~13-23 K and show a distinct cold dust effective temperature gradient from the centre towards the outer parts of the stellar disk. We find that the population of GDCs in our catalogue constitutes ~16% of the total dust mass of NGC 300, which we estimate to be about 5.4 × 10 6 M. At least about 87% of our GDCs have a high enough average dust mass surface density to provide sufficient shielding to harbour molecular clouds. We compare our results to previous pointed molecular gas observations in NGC 300 and results from other nearby galaxies and also conclude that it is very likely that most of our GDCs are associated with complexes of giant molecular clouds.Peer reviewe

Stellar Feedback and Resolved Stellar IFU Spectroscopy in the nearby Spiral Galaxy NGC 300

We present MUSE Integral Field Unit (IFU) observations of five individual HII regions in two giant (> 100 pc in radius) star-forming complexes in the low-metallicity (Z~0.33 Z) nearby (D ~ 2 Mpc) dwarf spiral galaxy NGC 300. We combine the IFU data with high spatial resolution HST photometry to demonstrate the extraction of stellar spectra and the classification of individual stars from ground-based data at the distance of 2 Mpc. For the two star-forming complexes, in which no O-type stars had previously been identified, we find a total of 13 newly identified O-type stars in the mass range 15-50 M, as well as 4 Wolf-Rayet stars. We use the derived massive stellar content to analyze the impact of stellar feedback on the HII regions. As already found for HII regions in the Magellanic Clouds, the dynamics of the analyzed NGC 300 HII regions are dominated by a combination of the pressure of the ionized gas and stellar winds. By comparing the derived ionized gas mass loading factors to the total gas mass loading factor across the NGC 300 disk, we find that the latter is an order of magnitude higher, either indicating very early evolutionary stages for these HII regions, or being a direct result of the multi-phase nature of feedback-driven bubbles. Moreover, we analyze the relation between the star formation rate and the pressure of the ionized gas as derived from small (<100 pc) scales, as both quantities are systematically overestimated when derived on galactic scales. With the wealth of ongoing and upcoming IFU instruments and programs, this study serves as a pathfinder for the systematic investigation of resolved stellar feedback in nearby galaxies, and it delivers the necessary analysis tools to enable massive stellar content and feedback studies sampling an unprecedented range of HII region properties across entire galaxies in the nearby Universe