Utah Aurora - May 10/11 2024

BYU Astronomy Research Group Joins the Astrophysical Research Consortium (ARC)

As of January 2021 BYU will be a member of the ARC Consortium (Link to Consortium) with access to the ARC 3.5-m telescope and the 0.5-m ARCSAT telescope.  The primary use of the ARC 3.5-m telescope time is for graduate student projects.  This provides a wide array of instrumentation that is currently being used to study objects in the solar system all the way to studies of the large scale structure of the Universe.

Other BYU Astronomy Facilities

In addition to our telescope time from the ARC consortium, we operate a number of our own astronomical facilities

West Mountain Observatory (West Mountain)

This is our mountain observatory at about 6600 ft above sea level.  This consists of three telescopes: 0.9-m, 0.5-m, and a 0.32-m. It is a 40 minute drive that ends in a 5 miles drive up a dirt road. The mountain itself can be seen from campus. We don't provide any tours of this facility.

Orson Pratt Observatory

The Orson Pratt Observatory is named for an early apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  It is our campus telescope facility and contains a wide variety of telescopes for student research and public outreach. We operate a 24" PlaneWave telescope in the main campus dome, plus a 16", two 12", one 8", and a 6" telescope on our observation deck.  The telescopes are all fully robotic. Beyond this we have a large sections of telescopes used on public nights.

Royden G. Derrick Planetarium (Planetarium)

This is a 119 seat, 39" dome planetarium with acoustically treated walls to allow it's use as a lecture room. Recently we upgraded to an E&S Digistar7 operating system with 4K projectors.  The planetarium is used for teaching classes, public outreach, and astronomy education research projects.





Selected Publications

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The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2011: Fe II Reverberation from the Outer Broad-line Region
Tabitha Buehler, Michael D. Joner, and C. David Laney (et al.)
The prominent broad Fe II emission blends in the spectra of active galactic nuclei have been shown to vary in response to continuum variations, but past attempts to measure the reverberation lag time of the optical Fe II lines have met with only limited success. Here we report the detection of Fe II reverberation in two Seyfert 1 galaxies, NGC 4593 and Mrk 1511, based on data from a program carried out at Lick Observatory in Spring 2011. Light curves for emission lines including H beta and Fe II were measured by applying a fitting routine to decompose the spectra into several continuum and emission-line components, and we use cross-correlation techniques to determine the reverberation lags of the emission lines relative to V-band light curves. In both cases, the measured lag (tau(cen)) of Fe II is longer than that of H beta, although the inferred lags are somewhat sensitive to the choice of Fe II template used in the fit. For spectral decompositions done using the Fe II template of Veron-Cetty et al., we find tau(cen)(Fe II)/tau(cen)(H beta) = 1.9 +/- 0.6 in NGC 4593 and 1.5 +/- 0.3 in Mrk 1511. The detection of highly correlated variations between Fe II and continuum emission demonstrates that the Fe II emission in these galaxies originates in photoionized gas, located predominantly in the outer portion of the broad-line region.
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The Stability of BVRI Comparison Stars Near Selected TeV Blazars
Cameron J. Pace, Pearson, Richard L., III, J. Ward Moody, Michael D. Joner, and Bret Little
We have measured Johnson BV and Cousins RI magnitudes for comparison stars near 5 TeV blazars. We compare our values with published values, spanning 25 years in some cases, to identify those stars that are most likely proven stable. To avoid zero-point offsets mimicking long-term variability, we based our analysis on the standard deviation between measurements after a mean offset between data sets was removed. We found most stars to be stable at the 0.04 mag level. We confirm two stars as variable and identify two others as possibly being variable. In each of the five fields there are at least two stars, and typically many more, that show no evidence of variability.
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M33: Triangulum Galaxy
Michael D. Joner and C. D. Laney (et al.)
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The Tulip in the Swan
Michael D. Joner and C. D. Laney (et al.)
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The Lick AGN Monitoring Project 2011: Dynamical Modeling of the Broad-line Region in Mrk 50
Tabitha Buehler, Michael D. Joner, and C. David Laney (et al.)
We present dynamical modeling of the broad- line region (BLR) in the Seyfert 1 galaxy Mrk 50 using reverberation mapping data taken as part of the Lick AGN Monitoring Project (LAMP) 2011. We model the reverberation mapping data directly, constraining the geometry and kinematics of the BLR, as well as deriving a black hole mass estimate that does not depend on a normalizing factor or virial coefficient. We find that the geometry of the BLR in Mrk 50 is a nearly face-on thick disk, with a mean radius of 9.6(-0.9)(+1.2) light days, a width of the BLR of 6.9(-1.1)(+1.2) light days, and a disk opening angle of 25 +/- 10 deg above the plane. We also constrain the inclination angle to be 9(-5)(+7) deg, close to face-on. Finally, the black hole mass of Mrk 50 is inferred to be log(10)(M-BH/M-circle dot) = 7.57(-0.27)(+0.44). By comparison to the virial black hole mass estimate from traditional reverberation mapping analysis, we find the normalizing constant (virial coefficient) to be log(10) f = 0.78(-0.27)(+0.44), consistent with the commonly adopted mean value of 0.74 based on aligning the M-BH-sigma* relation for active galactic nuclei and quiescent galaxies. While our dynamical model includes the possibility of a net inflow or outflow in the BLR, we cannot distinguish between these two scenarios.
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At the Edge of NGC 891
Michael D. Joner and C. D. Laney (et al.)