March 4, 1998


FEATURE TIP SHEET

	ASTRONOMER STEVEN MAJEWSKI MAY HAVE THE LAST LAUGH
	PURSUING RESEARCH HIS FIELD DIDN'T TAKE SERIOUSLY

	It's not that other astronomers laughed in his face.  They just
didn't take Steven Majewski seriously when he first talked about his
research on the Milky Way in the early 1990s.
	After all, why should they believe a shaggy-haired graduate
student whose hypothesis about the formation of our Galaxy rocketed in
the face of conventional wisdom?
	As a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, Majewski
compared 17-year-old photographs of the sky, taken by his dissertation
advisor, Richard Kron, with current photos that he took himself.  Using
a precise measuring machine, a microdensitometer, Majewski found that
the most distant stars were rotating around our Galaxy backwards.
	"My result was generally regarded as erroneous for several years
because no one had ever seen this backward motion before," Majewski
said.  "I went through the calculations dozens of times.  Once, before
getting this result, my advisor had jokingly reassured me about my
doctoral research by saying, 'Everything will turn out fine unless you
find something totally ridiculous, like the halo of the Galaxy rotating
backward.' But that is exactly what I found."
	Majewski's article describing his findings languished for months
at the Astrophysical Journal until, in 1992, a group of astronomers from
Mexico published an article on a closely related topic.  Majewski's
article came out the same year, but it wasn't until older, more
professionally established astronomers from the University of North
Carolina and Michigan State University published similar findings in
1995 that Majewski was given credit for his research results.
	Now, recognition is paying off by helping Majewski, an assistant
professor of astronomy at U.Va. for the past two years, raise funds to
further his research.  Last year, Majewski won nearly $1 million in
research funds for his path-breaking work on the formation of the Milky
Way. The money came in the form of a $455,000 CAREER Award from the
National Science Foundation and a $500,000 Packard Award, one of only
three ever won by University of Virginia professors.
	(U.Va's -- and Virginia's -- other two Packard winners are
Gabriel Robins, Walter N. Munster Associate Professor of Computer
Science, 1995; and Robert R. Jones, assistant professor of physics,
1996.)
	For the past half-century, astronomers have believed that the
Milky Way began as a cloud of gas that, through the force of gravity,
condensed into a galaxy about 25 times smaller than the original cloud
of gas.  As a result of this collapse, the Galaxy began to spin in such
a way that stars close to the center of the Galaxy began to rotate more
quickly, while stars close to the edge of the galaxy rotated more
slowly.  Under the old theory, the speed of rotation differed, but the
direction was identical -- all the stars in the Milky Way spun in the
same direction.
	But Majewski discovered something very odd.
	"I measured the motion of very distant stars in a way that
hadn't been done before and I found that they were rotating around the
Milky Way, but they were rotating backwards, a result that didn't fit
the old theory at all.  This meant that the old model [which was set out
formally in 1962] couldn't be the whole story.  Something else had to be
happening.

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	"So, my proposal was that perhaps the inner parts of the Milky
Way did follow the 1962 model.  But the outer parts, rather than being
involved in the collapse that formed the inner Milky Way, may have been
acquired later through the cannibalization of other galaxies.  This
would account for backward-rotating stars, because stars in a small
galaxy moving past the Milky Way in a backward direction would continue
to rotateÊin that direction even after the powerful gravitational
pull of the Milky Way shredded the galaxy and absorbed its entrails."
	The discovery in 1995 of the Sagittarius Galaxy, which is the
closest satellite galaxy to the Milky Way, further strengthened
Majewski's argument, because it is a victim in the same process of
cannibalization that Majewski used to explain his unexpected findings.
The formation of the Sagittarius Galaxy also suggests that the process
that formed the outer Milky Way has probably been going on for the past
15 billion years, Majewski said.
	A stargazer since elementary school, Majewski makes no apologies
for his love of pure science.
	"I was in school one day in fifth grade and a kid came in
talking about astronomy," Majewski said.  "It really made me angry that
I had no idea what he was talking about.  So, I endeavored to make sure
very soon that I knew what it was all about."	
	He saved his pennies to buy his first telescope and by the tenth
grade helped his science teacher, a geologist by training, teach the
section on astronomy.  He dragged his parents from their home in
suburban Chicago to the Yerkes Observatory near Lake Geneva, Wis., where
he informed the hapless doctoral student assigned to give tours for the
day that one day he, too, would be a researcher there.  A decade later,
he was.
	After completing his doctorate at the University of Chicago's
Yerkes Observatory in 1991, Majewski was a Carnegie Institution Fellow
for two years and a Hubble Space Telescope Fellow for another three.
For his work, plotting stars' positions and movements in the sky, he
used the Carnegie telescopes on a mountain in northern Chile.  An
assistant professor of astronomy at U.Va. for the past two years,
Majewski continues to use the Carnegie telescopes at Las Campanas as a
Carnegie Visiting Associate.
	The recently awarded Packard funds will allow Majewski to hire
some post-doctoral research assistants and pay for the high-speed
computers needed in the analysis of the voluminous computer data his
research generates.  It also will enable him to continue traveling to
Chile to work with the telescopes there and support collaboration with a
theorist at Princeton University to develop a computer model of the
cannibalization process.
	The David and Lucile Packard Foundation offers Fellowships for
Science and Engineering to support the nation's most promising young
professors.  Each year, the presidents of 50 select universities
nominate two young professors from each of their institutions, then a
panel of distinguished scientists selects 20 fellows to receive
individual grants of $100,000 annually for five consecutive years.
	NSF's CAREER program supports young scientists in pursuing their
educational and research objectives.  Funding runs from $200,000 to
$500,000 over a four-to-five-year period. During Fiscal Year 1997, 1,935
American scientists applied for financial support from CAREER. That
year, the program awarded 359 researchers grants totalling $40 million.
	[AN ELECTRONIC IMAGE of the Magellanic Clouds is available from
Rebecca Arrington, (804) 924-3801.  SUGGESTED CUTLINE: Majewski has
recently found evidence that the Milky Way's largest near neighbors, the
Magellanic Clouds that shine brilliantly in the Chilean skies, may also
be in the midst of Galactic digestion -- serving themselves up as an
entree in a giant Galactic feast.]
	
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	Majewski can be reached at (804) 924-4893 or by email at
srm4n@virginia.edu. For help in reaching him, call Charlotte Crystal at
(804) 924-6858. Television reporters should call the University's TV
News Office at (804) 924-7550.
	U.Va. news online: http://www.virginia.edu/topnews