Sky and Telescope - April 2018 - 12

NEWS NOTES
GALAXIES

Ordered Galaxies in Chaotic Early Universe
ated with forming stars - across the
face of these diminutive galaxies.
These observations show galaxies
forming 20 Suns' worth of stars every
year, more than is typical for that time
period. In fact, they look more like the
ﬂuffy disks typically seen at so-called
cosmic noon, the universe's adolescent
period of star formation and galaxy
growth. That implies rapid evolution,
as cosmic noon occurred more than
2 billion years after these two galaxies
existed. (They probably don't have spiral
arms, though, as such features take
more time to form.)
Simulations had predicted that it's
possible for some galaxies to evolve
more quickly than their peers do, notes
Nicolas LaPorte (University College
London), but this is the ﬁrst time it's
actually been observed.
■ MONICA YOUNG

OBITUARY

Comet Discoverer Thomas Bopp (1949-2018)
THOMAS JOEL BOPP,

codiscoverer of Comet
Hale-Bopp, died January
5, 2018, in Phoenix,
Arizona, from liver cancer. He was 68 years old.
Bopp's name will
forever be linked to
that of his friend and
colleague Alan Hale.
But the observers didn't
know each other before
they became inadvertent
partners in one of the
greatest comet discoveries of the 20th century.
On the night of July 22, 1995, Bopp
was out stargazing with friends. Alan
Hale, a professional astronomer, was
at his home in New Mexico. Both men
spotted the fuzzy object within 5 minutes of each other and sent messages to
Brian Marsden at the Central Bureau
for Astronomical Telegrams.
12

A PR I L 2 018 * SK Y & TELESCOPE

Their names were
attached to Comet
Hale-Bopp (C/1995 O1),
which ultimately brightened to magnitude -1
near its perihelion on
April 1, 1997 - a stunning evening object seen
by more than two-thirds
of all Americans.
As his fame grew,
Bopp left his job due
to a heavy schedule of
public appearances. He
and Hale were media
darlings, appearing on
TV and in newspapers and magazines.
Along with other accolades, Bopp was
awarded an honorary doctorate from
Youngstown State University. But the
discovery also brought tragedy, when
Bopp's brother and sister-in-law were
killed in a car accident after spending a
night photographing the comet.

p This data visualization shows the velocity
gradients across two young galaxies, indicating
that they've already settled into rotating disks.

Bopp was born in Denver, Colorado,
on October 15, 1949, and grew up in
Youngstown, Ohio. Introduced to the
sky by his father, Bopp received his ﬁrst
telescope (a 4-inch reﬂector) when he
was 10 years old. But he didn't start
deep-sky observing until after he left
the Air Force in 1972.
Bopp and his family moved to
Glendale, Arizona, where he met Jim
Stevens, another local amateur astronomer. The two became friends and spent
weekends observing with Stevens'
17.5-inch Dobsonian reﬂector. It was
on one of those trips - while looking at
M70 through the big Dob - that Bopp
chanced upon the comet.
Bopp continued to pursue his passion for stargazing until his death. He is
survived by his daughter, April BoppEsch, along with a granddaughter, three
sisters, and two brothers.
■ CAROLYN COLLINS PETERSEN

* To read more about Thomas Bopp's
life and see additional images, visit
https://is.gd/boppobit.

BOPP: K E VIN GILL; YOUNG G A L A XIES: HUBBLE (N ASA / ESA), A LM A (ESO / N AOJ
/ NR AO), P. OESCH (UNIV. OF G ENE VA) & R. SMIT (UNIV. OF CA MBRIDG E )

ASTRONOMERS EXPECTED that most
galaxies living among the chaos of the
infant universe would be turbulent
and disorganized free-for-alls. But new
observations have revealed surprisingly
mature galaxies when the universe was
only 800 million years old.
Renske Smit (University of Cambridge, UK) and colleagues report in the
January 11th Nature that two galaxies
have already settled into rotating disks,
suggesting rapid evolution right after
they were born.
Smit and colleagues ﬁrst found the
two galaxies in deep Spitzer Space Telescope images, then followed up using
the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a network of
radio dishes high in the Atacama Desert
in Chile. ALMA's incredible resolution
enabled the astronomers to measure
radiation from ionized carbon - associ-
https://www.is.gd/boppobit
Sky and Telescope - April 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - April 2018
