In collaboration with several scientific research organizations and with the aid of a National Science Foundation grant, a University professor is leading a project to found a national research institute called The Center for Chemistry of the Universe.
Chemistry Prof. Brooks Pate , the project leader, said the institution will aim not only to understand how molecules are formed in space but how molecules become matter.
“Today you look around you, there’s a lot around us,” Pate said. “[It] all started as molecules and then was delivered to earth.”
Pate will work with researchers from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the Arizona Radio Observatory, the University of Arizona, Ohio State University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he said.
NSF spokesperson Jenny Grasswick said the grant is a $1.5 million, three-year award for the development phase of the institute. After three years, Pate will be eligible to apply for a $40 million grant that would be distributed over the course of 10 years to complete the second phase of the project, which will be entail actually building the center, she said.
Pate added that his institute is one of three chemistry-related centers created this fall. Although each center deals with a different area of chemistry, Pate noted that because of current funding levels, most likely only one or two of the centers will receive funding for the second phase of development.
The projects are chosen in part, based on whether they capture the public’s interest, Pate said.
“It’s an area of science that really you can reach out to get people interested in chemistry and how chemistry occurs,” he said of his area of research.
He added that his project was “sufficiently complex” because it has three components that he referred to as full-scale fields of science.
The NSF was “looking for a team of distinguished researchers who work together to tackle big, challenging problems,” NSF Chemistry Division Director Luis Echegoyen said. “The chemistry of the universe is a science challenge that can grow into a major research center.”
Getting funding to initiate development was the first and most difficult challenge, Pate said. During the first two years of the project, he will target the issues that need to be resolved in order for the project to continue, he noted.
The first key aspect of the project will be discovering what molecules exist in space and where they exist, he said. Pate will collaborate with The National Radio Astronomy Observatory — whose director’s office is located on Grounds, — to achieve this task. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory owns one of the largest telescopes in the world, located in West Virginia, which will use radio-astronomy to pick up light emitted by the molecules as they rotate in space. The emitted light produces a signature that allows scientists to keep track of the molecules, Pate said.
The project’s second component will involve measuring the molecules in a laboratory, Pate said.
“One of the very powerful things about the field is that the signals you see in space, you can exactly reproduce in the lab,” he said, adding that the proposed Center for Chemistry of the Universe will develop new tools to measure the signatures left by molecules on Earth to match with the signatures of the molecules picked up by telescope.
The third component of the project aims to understand how the molecules are produced, he said. Pate said this third and final aspect of his project will be the most interesting because it is a relatively new — and unexplored — field.
“There were a lot of things that happened at Virginia in the last two or three years that we really felt could then go in and help the field of chemistry,” Pate said. “I think that’s a very compelling problem: to try and figure out exactly where everything comes from.”
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