Stellar Year for Prof. Cominsky

In August 1998 Dr. Lynn Cominsky gave two invited lectures at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center’s Summer Institute on Particle Physics. Her lectures, which were reprised in October during the fall semester’s “What Physicists Do” lecture series, were entitled “X-ray Emission from Compact Sources.”

She also finished work on the paper “X-ray/Gamma-ray Observations of the PSR B1259-63/SS2883 System near Apastron,” (Hirayama et al. 1999), which has been accepted by the Astrophysical Journal, and worked on another paper, “A Search for Aperiodic Millisecond Variability in Cygnus X-1,” (Chaput et al. 1999) which was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal in December 1998.

In the fall Cominsky also gave lectures entitled “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in the War and Peace series at SSU and a public lecture to over 300 people in the Mountain Theater on Mt. Tamalpais, entitled “The New Gamma-ray Astronomy.”

Throughout the year, Cominsky continued work on the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) with collaborators at Stanford and Goddard Space Flight Center. In her role as Chair of the GLAST Public Affairs Working Group, she received $45,000 in grant funding to perform “GLAST Mission Concept Studies and Public Outreach.” Work on this project has resulted in the release of the GLAST public outreach web site, which can be seen at: http://www-glast.sonoma.edu. The web site was designed and implemented by SSU physics student Tim Graves. GLAST may be launched in 2005.

Cominsky also helped write the Education and Public Outreach portion of the proposal to NASA MIDEX (medium-sized Explorer satellite) program entitled “Swift--Catching Gamma-ray Bursts on the Fly.” This proposal describes plans for a satellite to chase gamma-ray bursts and observe their afterglows at other wavelengths. It has been awarded Phase A funding from NASA. Cominsky and her collaborators are eagerly awaiting NASA’s decision for further funding. Swift is one of five missions competing for two flight opportunities, and if selected, could be launched in 2004. Cominsky will serve as Swift’s press officer, if it is selected.

The most exciting satellite event of the past year for Cominsky, however, was the long-awaited successful launch on February 23, 1999, of the Unconventional Stellar Aspect experiment on board the ARGOS satellite. On May 4, 1999, the X-ray proportional counters in USA saw “first light” and will soon begin the scientific program, which consists primarily of studying time-variable X-ray emission from selected black hole and neutron star binaries. Cominsky has been a co-investigator on USA since 1991, working with Stanford’s Particle Astrophysics Group and scientists from the Naval Research Laboratory.

In the spring Cominsky served as deputy press officer at the 193rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in Austin, Texas, and press officer at the AAS High Energy Astrophysics Division meeting in Charleston, SC. Cominsky organized all the press activities for the latter meeting, including briefings on the discovery of hypernova remnants, new results on black holes, and the discovery of exotic photon bubble phenomena in an X-ray pulsar. These briefings featured web sites designed and implemented by SSU student Tim Graves.

During the school year, Cominsky once again taught the popular Physics by Inquiry versionof the Physics 210/209 sequence. Ably assisted by SSU physics student Allan Baker, this twice-weekly course features hands-on learning in small groups, and encourages students to think about physics as they investigate the properties of matter, magnets, electric circuits and kinematics. She also taught a special studies course to four students, who learned advanced techniques of astronomical and physical data analysis, along with some probability and statistics. And she served on the Board of Directors for the SSU Enterprises, Inc., the Executive Committee of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center’s User Organization and the Engineering Sciences Curriculum Committee.