Our Place in the Universe
Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy Catrina Hamilton-Drager in the doorway of her office in the Tome Scientific Building, home of the Department of Physics & Astronomy. Photo by Dan Loh.
OFFICE HOURS: Catrina Hamilton-Drager, Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy
by Tony Moore
Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy Catrina Hamilton-Drager earned her Ph.D. from Wesleyan University. Best known for her pioneering work on the young stellar system known as KH 15D, her research focuses mainly on young stars in the process of forming. Hamilton-Drager has published in such journals as The Astrophysical Journal and teaches courses such as Workshop Physics: Matter and Fields and Observational Techniques.
The universe is literally infinite (or is it?), and you’ve carved out a fascinating niche within it by studying young stars and their spinning, planet-forming potential. Why is Dickinson the perfect launchpad for students who want to explore both the vast field of astronomy and its more esoteric corners?
Students can begin their exploration by taking our introductory courses that examine the solar system, as well as stars, galaxies and cosmology. Beyond that, we have a 200-level course that introduces students to astrophysics and then additional upper-level courses. The Michael L. Britton Memorial Observatory houses a 24-inch telescope on campus equipped with research-grade imaging equipment.
We recently added an echelle spectrograph to our equipment, which allows us to determine the temperatures of brighter stars, as well as the velocities of stars located in bright binary systems. While 24-inch telescopes and observatories are often found at small liberal arts colleges, echelle spectrographs are not. The installation of this instrument was part of an independent study project completed by Gavin Frueh ’24 and Abby Mead ’24 last year. Once up and fully functional, this instrument will not only support our advanced course in astronomical spectroscopy, but it will also allow us to expand our areas of research. Experience with this instrument will uniquely prepare students to enter graduate research programs.
We are also a part of the National Undergraduate Research Observatory (NURO) located in Flagstaff, Arizona, which has been generously supported by the college for about 40 years. We take students there to obtain and augment data for their research projects and generally introduce them to what it is like to use professional research facilities.
Your research in areas like angular momentum evolution, magnetospheres and circumbinary disks feels like a masterclass in astrophysical complexities meant to hurt people’s brains. Was there a specific discovery or moment that made you think, this is what I want to study for the rest of my career?
I have known since I was about five that I wanted to study the stars. My parents encouraged me by subscribing to Astronomy magazine among others and bought me a small telescope when I was about 12.
When I was a junior in college, I had the opportunity to go on a trip to the University of Arizona in Tucson. While there, we learned the latest image-analysis language, known as IRAF, and had the opportunity to observe with Professor John Huchra, who at the time was working on his redshift survey of galaxies, which led to a map of the large-scale structure of the universe. On this trip I was mesmerized by the mountains of the Southwest, the domes atop them, the telescopes within them, the techniques used for observing—everything! It was on that trip that I decided I wanted to be an observational astronomer. I wanted to give back to future undergraduate students what I had been given—the opportunity to learn how to “do astronomy” in a hands-on way—making observations with professional telescopes, reducing those data and to contribute to a research project. For me, that is what it has always been about. Along the way, I’ve been lucky enough to stumble onto some really interesting projects.
Stars spinning up, planets forming and magnetic fields doing their thing might seem pretty abstract to someone outside the field. How can grasping it all help students—and people more broadly—better understand the universe and maybe even our place in it?
I imagine that like me, students—and people more broadly—wonder about how the Earth and the other planets in our solar system came to be. I got hooked on star formation as an undergrad because I could see the connection between the formation of low-mass stars, much like our Sun, and how they can form planets from the remnants of their nascent clouds. This process takes millions of years, but by looking at clusters of stars of different ages, we are able to piece together the story of planet formation. And now, with missions like TESS and Kepler, we know that there are thousands of planets that are orbiting other stars. We can extrapolate from these observations and our theories and postulate that planets are ubiquitous throughout the universe.
What does that mean about our place in the universe? Well, it certainly tells us that we are on one of an unfathomable number of planets out there. The next question to consider is whether any of those planets could possibly host life. With the building blocks of life as we know it recently discovered in a sample returned from the asteroid Bennu, and the Europa Clipper mission speeding through the solar system right now to investigate the Galilean moon of Jupiter in 2030, it seems to me that we could be on the brink of discovering something completely groundbreaking. Stay tuned!
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Published February 5, 2025