Astronomy

The “Oh-My-God” particle has a new companion.

In 1991, physicists spotted a particle from space that crashed into Earth with so much energy that it warranted an “OMG!” With 320 quintillion electron volts, or exaelectron volts, it had the kinetic energy of a baseball zipping along at about 100 kilometers per hour.

Now, a new particle of comparable energy has been found, researchers report in the Nov. 24 Science. Detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment near Delta, Utah, the particle had an energy of about 240 exaelectron volts. And mysteriously, scientists are unable to pinpoint any cosmic source for the particle.

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“It’s a huge, huge amount of energy but in a tiny, tiny, tiny object,” says astroparticle physicist John Matthews of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, co-spokesperson of the Telescope Array collaboration.

Cosmic rays consist of protons and atomic nuclei that zip through space at wide range of energies. Particles with energies over 100 exaelectron volts are exceedingly rare: On average, scientists estimate, one such particle falls on a square kilometer of Earth’s surface each century. And particles over 200 exaelectron volts are even rarer — only a few such particles have previously been detected.

When a cosmic ray hits Earth, it collides with a nucleus of an atom in the atmosphere, creating a cascade of other particles that can be detected on Earth’s surface.

To catch the rarest, highest-energy particles, scientists build giant arrays of detectors. The Telescope Array monitors an area of 700 square kilometers using more than 500 detectors made of plastic scintillator, material that emits light when hit by a charged particle. Additional detectors measure ultraviolet light produced in the sky by the shower of particles (although those detectors weren’t operating during the newly reported particle’s arrival). Based on the times that individual scintillator detectors were hit by the cascade of particles, scientists can determine the direction of the incoming cosmic ray and use that information to trace it back to its origins.

Extremely high-energy cosmic rays come from outside the Milky Way, but their exact sources are unknown (SN: 9/21/17). Most scientists think they are accelerated in violent cosmic environments, such as the jets of radiation that blast out of the areas around certain supermassive black holes, or starburst galaxies that form stars at a frenetic pace. 

Whatever their origins, the particles must come from the relatively nearby cosmic neighborhood. That’s because the highest-energy cosmic rays lose energy as they travel, by interacting with the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang (SN: 7/24/18).

Tracing back the particle’s location is complicated. “The issue is that when you detect a high-energy cosmic ray at Earth, the arrival direction that you get will not point to the source because it will be deflected by … any magnetic field that would be in the way,” says Telescope Array collaborator Noémie Globus, an astroparticle physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the RIKEN research institute in Japan.  

The magnetic fields present in the Milky Way and its environs scatter the cosmic rays like fog scatters light. To trace the particle to its home, scientists must take that scattering into account. But that backtracking pinpointed a cosmic void, a region of space with few galaxies at all, much less ones with violent processes going on. 

That makes this particle particularly interesting, says astrophysicist Vasiliki Pavlidou of the University of Crete in Heraklion, Greece. “It’s actually pointing towards nothing at all, absolutely in the middle of nowhere.”

That might hint that scientist are missing something. For example, researchers may need to better understand the magnetic fields of the galaxy, says Pavlidou, who was not involved with the research. 

“Every time you have one of these very high-energy events, just because they are so rare, it’s a big deal.” More

In May, a star in the Pinwheel galaxy exploded in just the right place at nearly the right time for astronomers to unravel details of its death. It was the closest supernova to go off in the last five years.

Astronomers have long been fascinated with these stellar explosions, which signal the end of life for the universe’s biggest stars. Not only are they dramatic — a supernova can shine 5 billion times as bright as our sun — but the explosions seed the universe with gold, silver, zinc and other elements forged only in a dying star’s last moments.

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High-speed gas shooting from the galaxy M87 is causing stars to go nova, a study suggests, and no one knows how.

A nova occurs after a dense star known as a white dwarf receives gas from an orbiting star (SN: 2/12/21). As the white dwarf’s intense gravity squeezes the gas, it heats up and explodes, but both stars survive the violence. In fact, over millions of years, the same star goes nova again and again. Recent observations indicate that these eruptions forged much, and perhaps most, of the universe’s supply of the valuable metal lithium (SN: 5/7/19).

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Nova explosions erupt in our galaxy as well as others, including the giant elliptical M87, whose jet of fast-moving gas is powered by the black hole at the galaxy’s center (SN: 4/10/19). Now Hubble Space Telescope data show that there’s an excess of these explosions along M87’s jet, researchers report in a study submitted September 28 to arXiv.org.

Alec Lessing, an undergraduate student at Stanford University, Michael Shara, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and their colleagues used the telescope to locate 135 nova outbursts in M87, whose jet is many thousands of light-years long. The galaxy itself is 54 million light-years from Earth, at the heart of the nearest galaxy cluster, named Virgo.

The Hubble Space Telescope snapped this composite picture of the galaxy M87 and its jet of fast-moving gas, which is many thousands of light-years long.NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA

After identifying the nova explosions, the team plotted their positions in the galaxy. “It was striking to the eye,” Shara says of the plot. “The novae appeared to be preferentially aligned with the jet.”

By dividing the galaxy into 10 equal sectors, the astronomers found that 25 blasts occurred along the jet — versus only 10 to 16 in each of the galaxy’s other sectors. The chance that this is just a statistical fluke is only about 0.3 percent, the researchers say.

“I was really surprised,” says Massimo Della Valle, an astronomer at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Naples, who was not involved with the new study. “If these objects are novae, the jet has to be responsible for this somehow.”

Perhaps, he says, the jet pushes interstellar gas onto white dwarf stars in nova systems, increasing the amount of material that accumulates on the stars’ surfaces. As a result, the white dwarfs explode more frequently than they otherwise would, accounting for the surplus of nova outbursts along the jet.

The jet itself, Shara says, doesn’t seem to supply enough gas or radiation to explain the explosions. “The jet is to blame, but we just don’t know why or how,” he says. “It is somehow causing the novae to be more prevalent in that sector, but whether it’s because it’s triggering the novae somehow or birthing the novae — making more of them there — or some other process … we don’t know.”

For additional clues, Shara hopes to use Hubble to examine other galaxies that resemble M87, to see whether their jets are also accompanied by such eruptions. More

It’s big. It’s beautiful. It looks a bit like a sparkly, starry, slightly smooshed Eye of Sauron.

It’s the galaxy NGC 4632, and new radio telescope images suggest that it sports a rare “polar ring” — a halo of mostly hydrogen gas tilted about 90 degrees from the plane of the galaxy’s disk.

These spectacular structures, which can also contain dust and stars, are thought to encircle only about 1 in 1,000 galaxies. But now it seems that many more — possibly 30 times as many — could be hiding in plain sight, researchers report in the November Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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“The implication would be that there are tons of these things out there, masquerading as normal galaxies,” says astronomer Ronald Buta of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

Astronomers are still puzzling out how any galaxies have polar rings at all. But they’re thought to form as galaxies grow, either by colliding with other galaxies or by gobbling up gas.

“The rings give us clues about how [galaxies] can grow and evolve,” says astronomer Nathan Deg of Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.

Deg and colleagues spotted the ringlike structure around NGC 4632 — and one encircling another galaxy, NGC 6156 — in data from the WALLABY survey, a project that is scanning half of the southern sky with the ASKAP radio telescope in Western Australia.

“It immediately strikes you that, hey, look, there’s something funny going on right here that kind of looks like a ring,” Deg says.

It can be tough to tell rings from warped galactic disks, depending on how galaxies are oriented with respect to Earth. So the team used virtual reality visualizations to help distinguish the galaxies’ disks from the potential rings, and compared the real data with simulated observations of perfect polar rings viewed at different angles.

The scientists report that the stunning structures sported by the two galaxies are indeed probably polar rings, with NGC 4632’s ring spanning roughly 60,000 light-years.

And these two may have plenty of company. The fact that the team has already spotted two potential polar rings in the 592 galaxies included in these first bits of WALLABY data suggests that earlier estimates of the frequency of such structures were too low.

The team’s simulations, which tested how polar ring galaxies look to telescopes when viewed at different angles, indicate a similar conclusion. Altogether, the observations and simulations suggest that as many as 3 percent of nearby galaxies could have overlooked rings, too.

A fruit of these combined efforts is a striking composite image of NGC 4632’s starry disk, viewed in visible light, and the radio glow of its hydrogen halo. Hydrogen emits mostly radio light, so the structure is invisible in visible-light images of the galaxy previously taken by the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Larger telescopes taking closer looks, Deg says, might be able to spot stars in the halo too.

Thanks to large surveys like WALLABY, Deg says, “we’re in an era where we can discover these and figure out the rings in a way that we never could before.” More

Names have significance, especially when they’re written in the stars.

A group of astronomers is coalescing around an idea to rename two neighbors of the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

Named after explorer Ferdinand Magellan, the satellite galaxies are visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere. But Magellan’s name is not fitting, astronomer Mia de los Reyes and colleagues argue. The leader of the first expedition to successfully circle the globe, Magellan enslaved and killed Indigenous people encountered on the voyage, which set out from Spain in 1519 (SN: 9/17/19).

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“Because we’re naming things in the night sky, which belongs to everyone, we think that it’s important to have names that reflect all of humanity,” says de los Reyes, of Amherst College in Massachusetts. She calls for the name change in an opinion piece published September 12 in Physics. Magellan’s voyage helped pave the way for Spanish colonialism in South America, Guam and the Philippines, says de los Reyes, who is Filipino American. “Many people see Magellan as a villain in the Philippines.”

The Magellanic clouds loom large in the field of astronomy. They’re independent galaxies, but close enough that astronomers can observe the individual stars within (SN: 4/1/22). “The Magellanic Clouds are this amazing laboratory for seeing things up close and personal,” says astronomer Sally Oey of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a supporter of the name change.

Magellan wasn’t an astronomer. The clouds were noted by a member of his expedition, but they were already well-known to many cultures in the Southern Hemisphere, and even to previous European explorers. “It doesn’t make sense to have them named after any one person, let alone a person who never actually studied them,” says astronomer Gurtina Besla of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

The galaxies have been known scientifically by Magellan’s name since only the end of the 19th century — well after Magellan’s voyage. That’s just a blip in the history of astronomy, the researchers argue.

More than 100 astronomers have expressed interest in the campaign, anchored by a core group of about 50, de los Reyes says. The group aims to bring the proposal to the International Astronomical Union, in hopes of eventually holding a vote on the name change. Other fields of science are undergoing similar debates, with groups of researchers pushing to revise offensive names for certain plants and animals, for example (SN: 8/25/21).

The astronomers are now trying out new names.  One popular suggestion is to call them the “Milky Clouds.” That would maintain the commonly used acronyms, LMC and SMC. And it would reflect the galaxies’ connection to something much bigger than any one person — the Milky Way. More

Fewer supermassive black holes may undergo growth spurts than astronomers had suspected.

Every known large galaxy hosts a gargantuan black hole at its center. Some of those behemoths experience bursts of beefing up, during which time they blaze brightly. But recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope turned up far fewer of these active black holes than expected, researchers report in a paper submitted August 22 at arXiv.org.

If confirmed, the finding raises questions about how some supermassive black holes got to be so big and what, if any, impact they have on the galaxies they inhabit.

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Huge black holes, such as the one at the center of the Milky Way, tend to be pretty quiet (SN: 6/28/23). But occasionally, a surge of interstellar detritus rains down upon them — often following a collision with another galaxy — creating what’s called an active galactic nucleus, or AGN. Here, the heart of the host galaxy emits copious amounts of light at all wavelengths as the influx of material swirling around the black hole heats up. An AGN can not only outshine their host galaxies, but they are also the brightest persistent sources of light in the universe.

In 2017, astronomer Allison Kirkpatrick of the University of Kansas in Lawrence and colleagues predicted that JWST’s infrared eyes would find lots of these active black holes based on observations from other, less sensitive, space-based infrared telescopes. In the new study, Kirkpatrick and her team turned JWST toward a well-studied strip of sky where, in 2008, the Spitzer Space Telescope had found infrared signatures of active galactic nuclei in nearly a third of the 19 galaxies it studied.

Those galaxies, seen as they were around the peak of cosmic star formation roughly 10 billion years ago, were all relatively bright and massive. JWST is much more sensitive than Spitzer, so it’s capable of spotting fainter, more average-sized galaxies at the same epoch — ones more comparable in size to the Milky Way. And yet, out of the nearly 500 galaxies that JWST spotted, all observed for the first time, just 6 percent appear to contain active galactic nuclei, the team reports.

“We are actually probing a new population” of galaxies, says Tonima Tasnim Ananna, an astronomer at Wayne State University in Detroit, who was not involved with the study. The new data come from the far reaches of the universe, a region now more accessible than ever before thanks to JWST.

The new-to-us galaxies appear to be filled with interstellar dust. So it is possible, Kirkpatrick says, that fast-growing black holes are hiding in these distant dusty galaxies, and researchers just don’t have the technical capabilities to identify them yet.

If there really aren’t as many of these fast-growing black holes as once thought, it would throw astronomers’ understanding of black hole and galaxy formation for a loop. Supermassive black holes can weigh as much as several million — or even several billion — suns. The AGN phase is thought to be an important step for gathering so much mass.

“Maybe all galaxies don’t go through this active phase, [and] their black holes grow pretty slowly,” Kirkpatrick says. This would mean that some supermassive black holes would need to have started out relatively hefty, rather than growing up from comparably tiny objects.  

And an active black hole doesn’t just grow quickly in isolation. It also affects its host galaxy. “It gets really, really hot” in an AGN, Kirkpatrick says. That can make it harder for the host galaxy to form stars, which need relatively cool gas to get started.

And the radiation pressure around a rapidly accreting supermassive black hole can be powerful enough to launch winds “like a trillion hurricanes just ripping through your galaxy,” Kirkpatrick says. These winds could, in turn, make things too unstable near the galaxy’s center for planets to form that are capable of sustaining life, she says. But if many black holes aren’t going through an AGN phase, they may not be influencing their host galaxies all that much.

Another explanation for the apparent dearth of active black holes in the new JWST data is that many supermassive black holes could grow up through periodic, short bursts of activity. In that case, they would have influenced the galaxy around them — but such bursts would be virtually undetectable.

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If the black holes “just flicker on and off for short time periods,” Kirkpatrick says, “you’re never going to find these things. You’re never going to be able to understand how the black holes are growing.”

More answers could be coming soon: Kirkpatrick is planning to use JWST again in January to conduct an even larger search. Instead of the nearly 500 galaxies used in this study, she says, “I’m going to have probably 4,000 galaxies to look at now.” More

When Brant Robertson saw a new measurement of the distance to a familiar galaxy, he laughed out loud.

For more than a decade, the galaxy had been a contender for the most distant ever observed. In 2012, Robertson and colleagues used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to show that the galaxy’s light had shone across the universe from about 13.3 billion years ago — less than 400 million years into the universe’s existence.

Not everyone believed it. “We got a lot of flak,” recalls Robertson, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It seemed too implausible that it was at such a great distance.” It felt like he was going around claiming to have seen the Loch Ness monster. More

One of a telescope operator’s primary jobs is to keep any stray light out of the instrument. Earthly and other unwelcome photons can swamp the cosmic light from distant stars and galaxies. During more than a decade as a project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, Jane Rigby obsessed over minimizing light leaks — with extraordinary success. The sky looks darker to JWST than most anyone had hoped.

Rigby herself, now the senior project scientist for JWST, is a source of light.

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“I remember the light in her eyes,” says astrophysicist Jane Charlton, who met Rigby the summer before her freshman year at Penn State and later advised her research. “Jane had incredible grades, but that’s not necessarily what I look for. The love of astronomy, and passion for that, is what I look for.”

Nearly three decades later, Rigby’s palpable joy in discussing the success of JWST, which launched on December 25, 2021, has made her one of the public faces of the telescope. She presented the telescope’s first images at the White House and has given keynote speeches at some of the biggest astronomy meetings (SN: 8/13/22, p. 30). During public appearances, she often wears JWST-themed socks, scarves and pins. “I have JWST socks for pretty much every day of the week,” she says.

She has also lit a path for queer astronomers, as well as others who are historically underrepresented in astronomy. Rigby has been out as part of the LGBTQ+ community since 2000, when she met her now-wife when they were both astronomy graduate students at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She has devoted much of her career to holding the door open for others.

“I didn’t grow up with any queer role models,” she says. “I hope I’m the last generation for which that’s true.”

Focusing on the instruments

Rigby remembers being asked to draw a favorite TV show in preschool. She used up an entire black crayon drawing Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

Her interest in space crystallized into a career plan at about age 12, after she saw Sally Ride speak at a local college. Ride, the first American woman in space, made Rigby want to be an astronaut.

“I knew there were two paths to becoming an astronaut: a test pilot or a scientist,” she says. “And it was pretty clear that I was never going to be tall enough to fly the shuttle.” At 5 feet, 2 inches tall, she’s still two inches too short to have been a space shuttle pilot. If she couldn’t make it to space, she saw more potential in science than in flying planes.

Rigby’s first experience using a telescope for research, as an undergraduate student at Penn State, was stymied by light leaks. She, Charlton and another student traveled to western Texas to use the telescope at the McDonald Observatory. They were looking to catch light from a distant quasar filtering through a diffuse and mysterious cloud of cosmic gas. These small, dense clouds appear to be packed with heavy elements from supernova explosions, but surprisingly, they’re not found in galaxies’ centers where a lot of stars are born and dying. “We were, at that time, trying to figure out what they were,” Charlton says. “As we still are.”

After a night of guiding the telescope by hand, the group realized that light from something other than the quasar — maybe an alert light on an instrument panel — had flooded the telescope. The trio tracked it down, covered it with tape and tried again. The same thing happened night after night. Ultimately, they returned to Pennsylvania with no quasar data.

“It didn’t work,” Rigby says. “But it was really fun. I was learning everything, trying to learn how the telescope worked.”

Jane Rigby has had the opportunity to observe at many notable telescopes around the world, including the Magellan telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, shown here around 2011.J. Rigby

Since then, Rigby has used many major telescopes, from those at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to the Magellan telescopes in Chile to the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. Along the way, her research developed a theme: investigating how galaxies grow and change along with the super­massive black holes hiding within.

But her approach is less “How can I answer this burning question?” and more “What can I do with this shiny new instrument?”

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“I’m a very observational astronomer,” she says. “I will use any telescope I can get my hands on.”

All that telescope time meant she was ready to join the JWST team when the opportunity came.

“Because she had seen data from Spitzer and Hubble,” JWST’s precursors, says astronomer Matt Mountain of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C., “she knew what she was looking for.”

Meeting the James Webb Space Telescope

Rigby began working on JWST in 2010, when she took a job at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., as the telescope’s deputy operations project scientist.

One of the first things she did was read the report of an independent review panel that found that the telescope was mismanaged, over budget by billions of dollars and would launch years later than originally planned (SN: 11/11/10). “I’ve certainly been four years from launch multiple times,” she says.

Before launch, most of her time was devoted to making sure that changes to the telescope’s design wouldn’t mess up the science. She imagined possible ways to use JWST and met with other team members to make sure the final telescope would deliver on those goals. Would the telescope materials glow or release gases that could freeze to the machine? Could JWST use two cameras simultaneously? Could it study moving targets, like asteroids within the solar system (SN: 11/5/22, p. 14)?

“Because she is a working scientist who really wanted to use the data,” Mountain says, “she was an ideal choice for operations scientist,” a job she moved up to in 2018. “In these complex spaces, with all the engineering, the personalities, the politics at NASA, working with contractors, she always keeps her eye on the prize: What science are we trying to do?”

Rigby bridged the divide between the science and engineering teams, helping them speak a common language. Her job has been “a lot of active listening and soft power, a lot of synthesizing and a dose of specialized technical expertise,” she says. “Oftentimes I’m the big-picture person in a room full of specialists.”

Thousands of people worked on the James Webb Space Telescope, shown here at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 2017.Desiree Stover/NASA

Engineer Larkin Carey removes the cover that kept the telescope’s instruments safe from contaminants and stray light while it was being assembled and tested.CHRIS GUNN/NASA

After the telescope launched, got in position and unfolded itself — “the six-month unwrapping of the Christmas present,” Rigby says — her job shifted to characterizing how well the telescope works. In practically every metric, it’s a dream come true.

There’s better-than-expected image quality, higher sensitivity, faster response times and a longer potential mission lifetime than predicted before launch — and practically no light leaks. The telescope’s great golden mirrors are exposed to space, and light can scatter off dust grains on the mirrors, registering on images as faint, diffuse patterns the team calls “wisps” and “claws,” or a ghostly streak dubbed “the lightsaber.” But the mirrors proved remarkably dust-free, meaning the sky appears incredibly dark.

“It’s not an accident that the telescope works so well,” she says. “That was careful work beforehand.”

When asked about such successes, and her own, Rigby points to a huge amount of work by tens of thousands of people. “I understand the desire to humanize something that can seem really big and impersonal. But I don’t like the singling out,” she says. “I try to reflect it back to the team.” It took thousands of people and tasks to ensure JWST’s success. Engineer Larkin Carey, with Ball Aerospace, for example, cleaned every square centimeter of the telescope’s mirrors by hand with a tool like a shaving brush, Rigby says.

With the telescope working so well, Rigby could turn her attention to the scientific questions. She helps lead an observing program called TEMPLATES, looking at galaxies whose light has been magnified by foreground objects to get a glimpse at how the galaxies form stars. At a June meeting in Albuquerque of the American Astronomical Society, Rigby shared how the TEMPLATES team found hydrocarbons, “the same stuff that smoke is made of,” in a galaxy whose light dates back more than 12 billion years — the furthest back in time such molecules had ever been seen.

Early in July, Rigby became the senior project scientist for JWST; it’s her job to figure out how to get the most and best science out of the telescope.

Research colleagues describe her as superhuman. “I don’t know how she does everything that she does, and does everything well,” says TEMPLATES collaborator Keren Sharon of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. And Rigby’s enthusiasm is abundant: “She gets giddy,” Sharon says. “It could be about figuring out a bug, or discovering this super exciting thing about a galaxy that we didn’t know before … and she’s literally bouncing. Her face lights up.”

With data from the James Webb Space Telescope, Rigby and colleagues found signs of hydrocarbons in this galaxy (red ring, shown in false color) more than 12 billion light-years from Earth. A second, closer galaxy (blue) lined up perfectly to magnify the light from the more distant one.J. SPILKER, S. DOYLE, NASA, ESA, CSA

Opening doors for others

Rigby wants anyone to be able to experience and pursue that enthusiasm. When she started attending American Astronomical Society meetings in the 1990s, she didn’t know there was a secret LGBTQ+ networking dinner. “You had to know it existed. That was a little closety. But it’s where people were.”

At the time, there was a lack of protection from employment discrimination and no guarantee of institutional support for astronomers with same-sex partners. Rigby recalls accepting a fellowship at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif., and immediately having to request health insurance benefits to cover her partner.

“That’s awkward,” she says. “You want to be talking about your science and your telescope proposals, not how can I get health insurance for my family because we’re different.” Finding other LGBTQ+ astronomers was “a lifeline,” she says.

These days, the meet-up at AAS is too big to go out to dinner. At a January 2023 meeting in Seattle, “we lost count at 120 people. We had to spill out into the hallway,” Rigby says. “That feels good.”

Seeing queer astronomers like Rigby so far along in their careers was helpful to Traci Johnson, a data scientist who was a graduate student in astronomy in Sharon’s lab at the University of Michigan. Johnson identifies as lesbian and nonbinary and came out during graduate school. “I realized it is possible to be out, and be happy, and also have a really amazing career,” Johnson says.

Rigby has taken an active role in encouraging inclusivity, though she seems to be up against the legacy of JWST’s namesake. Many astronomers have called for the telescope to be renamed because James Webb was NASA administrator at a time when the U.S. government fired employees for being gay.

Rigby won’t comment on the telescope’s name. But her support for LGBTQ+ astronomers is clear. Rigby was a founding member of the AAS Committee for Sexual-Orientation and Gender Minorities in Astronomy, which works to promote equality for LGBTQ+ astronomers within the field; has co-organized conferences on making astronomy more inclusive; and authored a recent white paper urging the astronomy community to address diversity, inclusion and harassment. A current priority is making sure trans people feel safe and welcome.

Rigby doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as “the gay astronomer.” She knows her contributions to astronomy extend far beyond any particular group. But she says the leadership skills, resilience and ability to shift her perspective that she has learned through living and organizing as a member of the LGBTQ+ community have made her a better astronomer. They’re skills she transfers to her role as a leader at NASA.

“The whole vision is, you get to bring your authentic self to work,” she says. “And work embraces your authentic self.” More