AMHERST — From starlight to stardust, everything in the universe is connected.
Such a reference to universal interconnectedness might sound corny if it wasn’t coming from Kevin Harrington, a 23-year-old University of Massachusetts Amherst senior who recently discovered eight new galaxies. The galaxies happen to be among the brightest objects in the universe — an astronomical breakthrough published in last month’s “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.”
Harrington attributes his rapid research trajectory to a series of cosmic coincidences dating back to a project he did for Michael Gyra, an astronomy teacher at Barnstable High School. There, Harrington says, he used his drumming talents to illustrate a connection between how sound connects the objects in a room like stardust connects the universe.
“Everything has just sort of one after another come together,” Harrington says of his recent success.
He is slated to graduate in May with a double major in astronomy and neuroscience and a minor in Afro-American studies. He says that while it’s rare for an undergraduate to be the lead author on such a paper, it’s all about good timing.
Speaking with the Gazette in a basement room of the university’s New Africa House, Harrington remotely controls a telescope in Greenbank, Virginia, tracking objects visible on a projector. In a separate tab, he controls an assortment of funk music. Across the hall is a room full of his personal collection of 30 or so drums, which he deploys in teaching a drum class for the university.
Whereas he spends so much time studying objects that are billions of light years away, Harrington says the drumming keeps him grounded.
“The thing about these galaxies is that they’re the brightest objects in the universe that have ever been observed,” says Harrington, wearing a T-shirt with “Astro Junkies” written diagonally across it. The Staples Singers’ “Respect Yourself” fills the room — this stargazer has a very down-to-earth taste in music. “And the reason why they’ve never been observed before — they’re so bright — is because the technology just evolved recently.”
Harrington says he launched into the research world when he took on a summer internship with the Five College astronomy department in 2013.
“I was saying yes to absolutely everything at that time, but I didn’t know what I was getting myself into,” Harrington says of the decision.
The discovery began coming together during a trip to Mexico in 2014, during which Harrington says he used the Large Millimeter Telescope, owned jointly by UMass and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, to look more closely at a list he had developed of interesting objects. In the following months, Harrington says he worked with his advisers to layer the information he’d obtained with data from two satellite telescopes — Planck, which charts the entire sky, and Herschel, which looks more pointedly at objects.
Layering data from the three telescopes, he says he began to realize he was entering uncharted territory.
“I was at a loss of words,” he says. “I couldn’t really believe it.”
In line with standard practice, Harrington says he named the galaxies for their coordinates, which are “spread out in all directions.”
“If I had to name these galaxies I’d name them after the New Africa House, because I love this place,” he says, laughing.
The luminosity of the galaxies, says Harrington, comes from their age. These young galaxies are producing about one star per hour, whereas the Milky Way, he says, has aged to where it’s producing only one solar mass per year. Young galaxies are also more visible because of the amount of stardust floating around inside them — “like someone who hasn’t dusted in a long time” — which soaks up ultraviolet light and signals it back toward Earth in the form of infrared radiation.
It’s also possible, Harrington explains, that intervening masses are refracting and magnifying light emanating from these galaxies.
Harrington says the objects he studies are billions of light years away and the light he’s observing is sourced from 10 to 12 billion years ago.
“I try not to think about it,” he says of the distance. “I drum it out.”
He started drumming in middle school, he says, but it’s become especially important as his research world expands.
“It’s very important to be creative so the tedious things have meaning,” he says, adding that so much of his day is filled with rapid-fire thoughts, but when he’s drumming his mind is clear. He has an assortment of drums of different sizes, but most commonly reaches for the djembe and congas.
Harrington says he stumbled upon the New Africa House when he signed up for a university trip to Senegal over winter break in 2013. He says he went to the building to register for the trip, got to talking about drums and before you know it he was teaching a class.
“There’s a cosmic synchronicity of how that got lined up,” Harrington says, comparing it to the precise alignment needed for gravitational lensing, the process by which intervening masses like planets or black holes can amplify a galaxy’s perceived luminosity. “There’s life lensing that takes place, in my opinion. The things in your life line up and amplify your life condition.”
With his head so often in the clouds, Harrington says he can’t help but think philosophically about his surroundings.
“These things are so far away it’s hard to believe,” says Harrington. “For the past couple of years I’ve been trying to wrap my head around that and I find these galaxies very inspirational.”
The Milky Way, he says, is a more evolved galaxy — “astrophysically it’s a rather quiescent, laid-back time” for the home galaxy — but Harrington points out how mind-boggling it is that these galaxies he discovered produce a whole star in an hour.
“The fact that they can form a star per hour — if the universe can do that, how can one relate that to creating value in one’s life? How much value can you create in one hour? You can use that as a source for inspiration — I do.”
He says that’s an analogy he takes to high schoolers in Marshfield, where he grew up, in the hope it spurs them as much as it does him.
Harrington says he decided to study astronomy and neuroscience because he sees a lot of similarities in the ways the brain and the universe function. Neural networks are like galaxy clusters, he says.
“There are organic biological patterns that I think are definitely prevalent at all scales,” he says. “It’s my hope that in the future there will be a way of synthesizing our understanding of the brain and our understanding of the universe — there’s so many hints that those two things go together, but it’s to be explored.”
Harrington leaves in July for Germany, where he will begin his doctoral program at Max Planck Research School for Astronomy.
Amanda Drane can be contacted at adrane@gazettenet.com.