On a typical day, is an astrophysicist, studying the far reaches of the universe.

These aren’t typical days. Across the ��������, faculty, staff, clinicians and students are stepping forward in a variety of ways to support the COVID-19 response, particularly efforts to help front-line medical personnel.

Dalcanton, a UW professor, is busy wrangling badly needed facemasks and other personal protective equipment for medical professionals during the coronavirus response. Volunteers are collecting and distributing unused masks from front porches to medical providers, all while practicing safe-distance guidelines and hygiene.

“Our niche isn’t to make new masks. Ours is just about collecting some of the small resources people already have,” she said. Dalcanton is one of the creators and operators of the , one of several self-made distribution hubs in the region matching donations with medical providers in need.

“Lots of us want to be of use,” she said.

That desire to help out has spurred other initiatives, too, and help has poured in from around the globe to assist in the relief effort in Seattle, said Jennifer Hazelbrook, who works in UW Medicine Advancement.

“We had to build a system to respond to the generous outpouring of support,” Hazelbrook said.

They’ve developed a that catalogues the needs of UW Medicine and then asks the community for donations. Each day a crew of specially trained volunteers from the UW is collecting donations — masks, goggles, hand sanitizer and more — from the public near the UW Plant Services Building. The volunteers are themselves armed in protective gear, with one person assigned to greet and thank the donor, another person to collect the donations and another team assigned to sort and inventory the donations received.

“It’s been really inspiring to see how the entire community and the UW have rallied to support UW Medicine’s patients and caregivers,” Hazelbrook said. “Our job is just to be able to bring in as many of the critically needed donations as we can.”

And the donations have included more than medical supplies.

Seattle restaurant London Plane donated a week’s worth of staff meals. Lacey-based Girl Scout Troop 45030 collected and donated 286 boxes of cookies for the staff breakrooms at UW Medicine hospitals. Even the singer Lizzo donated lunches for medical workers at UW Medical Center recently.

"You guys are heroes," –

💜💛

— UW Medicine (@UWMedicine)

But it’s been the outpouring of support from the community that’s made the biggest difference.

Kathleen Farrell, the work-life program manager for UW Human Resources, helped to create a kind of service for UW Medicine workers. The service matches people in need with UW students, staff, faculty and families and friends who are available to help with child care. Background checks are done for free. There’s also a way for employees who need financial support to ask for no-cost child care.

So far, more than 120 employees have asked for child care help, while about 450 UW students have raised their hands to provide care along with more than 200 friends and family of UW Medicine workers, Farrell said. Of those, 36% of UW students who offered to provide care are willing to do so at no cost, and 16% of UW friends and families are able to work for free.

“It’s really just been heartwarming,” she said.

Local residents should take a look in their hardware supplies and emergency kits to see if they have any items that could be put toward the medical relief effort, such as N95 masks, Dalcanton said.

It doesn’t matter if people have two masks or 2,000; groups like the Seattle Mask Brigade will pick up donated supplies and deliver them to medical centers in need.

“It’s a privilege to be able to help. It’s wonderful to be exposed to the goodness of people,” Dalcanton said. “We’re deeply indebted to the health care workers on the front line and happy to be able to support them.”

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More photos

When astronomers peer deep into space, they don’t expect to find something staring back at them.

In this new image, an uncanny pair of glowing eyes glares menacingly in our direction. The piercing “eyes” are the most prominent feature of what resembles the face of an otherworldly creature.

Hubble observed this unique system as part of a “snapshot” program that takes advantage of occasional gaps in the telescope’s observing schedule to squeeze in additional pictures. , a �������� professor of astronomy and chair of the Department of Astronomy, led the team that captured the image, which also included , a UW research associate professor of astronomy, and , a UW doctoral student in astronomy.

The phenomenon that the team captured in this image is no ghostly apparition. Hubble is looking at a titanic head-on collision between two galaxies.

Each “eye” is the bright core of a galaxy, one of which slammed into another. The outline of the face is a ring of young blue stars. Other clumps of new stars form a nose and mouth.

The entire system is catalogued as Arp-Madore 2026-424, or AM 2026-424, from the Arp-Madore “Catalogue of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations.”

Although galaxy collisions are common — especially back in the young universe — most are not head-on smashups, like the collision that likely created this Arp-Madore system. The violent encounter gives the system an arresting “ring” structure for only a short amount of time, about 100 million years. The crash pulled and stretched the galaxies’ disks of gas, dust and stars outward. This action formed the ring of intense star formation that shapes the nose and face.

Ring galaxies are rare; only a few hundred of them reside in our larger cosmic neighborhood. The galaxies have to collide at just the right orientation to create the ring. The galaxies will merge completely in about 1 billion to 2 billion years, hiding their messy past.

The side-by-side juxtaposition of the two central bulges of stars from both galaxies also is unusual. Because the bulges that make the eyes appear to be the same size, it is evidence that two galaxies of nearly equal proportions were involved in the crash, rather than more common collisions where small galaxies are gobbled up by their larger neighbors.

Dalcanton and her collaborators plan to use this innovative Hubble program to take a close look at many other unusual interacting galaxies. The goal is to compile a robust sample of nearby interacting galaxies, which could offer insight into how galaxies grew over time through galactic mergers. By analyzing these detailed Hubble observations, astronomers could then choose which systems are prime targets for follow-up with NASA’s , scheduled to launch in 2021.

Astronomer Halton Arp published his compendium of 338 unusual-looking interacting galaxies in 1966. He later partnered with astronomer Barry Madore to extend the search for unique galactic encounters in the southern sky. Several thousand galaxies are listed in that survey, published in 1987.

The Hubble image of AM 2026-424 was taken June 19, 2019, in visible light by the Advanced Camera for Surveys. The system is 704 million light-years from Earth.

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For more information, contact Dalcanton at jdal@uw.edu.

Adapted from by the Space Telescope Science Institute.

��������’s has produced a stunningly detailed portrait of the Galaxy, displaying a full spiral face aglow with the light of nearly 25 million individually resolved stars. It is the largest high-resolution mosaic image of Triangulum ever assembled, composed of 54 Hubble fields of view spanning an area 19,400 light-years across.

The project behind this mosaic is led by , a �������� professor of astronomy. Other major contributors include UW astronomy graduate student Meredith Durbin and UW astronomy professor .

The images show areas of star birth glow bright blue throughout the galaxy, particularly in nebulas of hot, ionized hydrogen gas.

Triangulum, also known as M33, is a spiral galaxy and one of our neighbors in a collection of dozens of galaxies called the Local Group. Triangulum is oriented with its face toward us, ideal for studying the distribution of stars and gas in its well-defined spiral structure. While astronomers are still delving into the immense trove of data collected by Hubble, a few characteristics stand out immediately, inviting comparisons and contrasts with our own Milky Way galaxy and the third large spiral galaxy in the Local Group, the Andromeda galaxy.

“My first impression on seeing the Hubble images was, wow, that really is a lot of star formation,” said Dalcanton. “The star formation rate intensity is 10 times higher than the area surveyed in 2015.”

Astronomers think that Triangulum has been an introvert, avoiding disruptive interactions with other galaxies, instead spending the eons tending its well-ordered spiral and turning out new generations of stars. Further research may determine if Triangulum is actually a newer member of the Local Group of galaxies, and whether its quiet days will soon be over.

This mosaic was created from images taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys between February 2017 and February 2018. The panoramic image was presented at this week’s of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

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For more information, contact Dalcanton at jd@astro.washington.edu and Williams at ben@astro.washington.edu.

Adapted from press releases by the and the .

On July 6, proposed a new type of mission to crack some of the universe’s most intriguing mysteries and search for life on distant worlds. �������� professor co-chaired the committee from , or AURA. The group unveiled what Dalcanton described as a “call to arms,” a detailed proposal for a deep-space telescope to peer far into the cosmos. Members see this ambitious mission as a worthy successor to the – ��������’s Earth-orbiting observatory that revolutionized our knowledge of the universe since its launch in 1990 – and upcoming missions like the , launching in 2018, and the , launching in the mid-2020s.

Given the decades spent planning the Hubble and the James Webb space telescopes, Dalcanton believes this is the ideal time to consider the future.

“If we think about what we want in the sky after the James Webb Space Telescope, we need to start thinking about it now,” she said. “These are decades-long projects. No mission happens accidentally. AURA thought that it was time to start looking ahead to find a path forward that is scientifically transformative but also technologically possible.”

Dalcanton and her colleagues propose the , or HDST. This observatory would sit more than 1 million miles from Earth — far beyond the orbit of the moon — where it could search for Earth-like planets around distant stars. The telescope would employ its nearly-40-foot-wide mirror to detect light from faint planets, after suppressing the light from the much brighter stars they orbit. Scientists on Earth can analyze the light signatures from those planets to determine the composition of the planets’ atmospheres and look for chemical signatures similar to Earth’s.

“The goal is not just to find watery planets with rocky cores,” stressed Dalcanton. “We want to find atmospheres that have been shaped by the presence of life.”

An alien astronomer measuring Earth’s chemical signatures, for example, would probably be stunned to find that our atmosphere is over 20 percent oxygen gas and contains significant amounts of methane. That would be an unexpected combination for a lifeless planet, and a sign that Earth is no ordinary world.

“If you leave an atmosphere up to its own devices, it wouldn’t have both oxygen and methane,” said Dalcanton. “The only reason we have both is because life is shaping the atmosphere.”

The committee proposes that HDST survey approximately 50 Earth-like worlds to look for multiple unusual signatures that could be signs of life. This would involve an extensive search for potentially habitable planets around hundreds of stars, as well as detailed measurements of their atmospheres. These observations would help planetary scientists understand how Earth-like worlds form and when life might arise and evolve on distant globes.

HDST’s giant mirror and other technological advances would give this space telescope greater sensitivity than any of its predecessors. It will be able to see planets whose reflected light rays are 10 billion times fainter than the stars they orbit. HDST’s resolving capacity would also be 25 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope’s, producing sharper and more detailed images. The telescope would be 100 times more sensitive than Hubble to ultraviolet radiation, which will allow scientists to observe how galaxies recycle cosmic gas, dust and other materials in a billions-year cycle of star birth and death.

HDST is part of the next-generation vision for advances in astronomy, said Dalcanton. Through proposals and rigorous advocacy for the Hubble Space Telescope and other missions, her predecessors sowed seeds for today’s discoveries. Upcoming missions like the James Webb Space Telescope will fuel discoveries over the next decade. But Dalcanton said she and her co-authors want to think far into the future.

“Hubble launched 25 years ago when I started grad school, and at lot of us in my generation realize that we have to pay this success forward,” she said. “I would like to see the High-Definition Space Telescope in the sky because there will be another astronomy graduate student who’s going to have a fantastic career of discovery using it.”

Dalcanton, co-chair from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and their team discussed HDST with a July 6 at the in New York. The event coincided with the release of for the High-Definition Space Telescope. Dalcanton hopes this report will guide and influence astronomers, engineers and policymakers as they decide which major projects to pursue in the decades to come.

“This is a chance to get people excited about something that could be their children’s Hubble,” Dalcanton concluded.

In addition to Dalcanton and Seager, co-authors include 15 astronomers and technology experts from U.S. universities and research institutions. AURA commissioned the report and the organized the announcement and panel discussion.

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For more information, contact Dalcanton at 206-685-2155 or jd@astro.washington.edu.