campus scene

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Gavel falls on Moore Hall "Pink Palace" sold
Skidmore closes UWW program Putting a price on value
Starstuck? Prof, students examine "cool gas and dark matter"
Arts on tap citywide SaratogaArtsFest returns

Starstruck

Jake Turner ’11, Prof. Mary Crone Odekon, and Michael Kellar ’10 ponder “cool gas and dark matter,” their astrophysics project in Skidmore’s collaborative research program.

This summer’s 39 partnerships involved 34 faculty members and 51 students in studies from biology to dance to economics. In July, Odekon and five other professors welcomed a special new crop of students into their projects: rising sophomores who are the first participants in Skidmore’s newest science and math scholarship program, funded by a National Science Foundation grant.

For their physics project, Odekon and crew analyzed data from a giant radio telescope in Aricebo, Puerto Rico (which two of them visited last year), to calculate and compare galaxies’ distributions of total mass, most of which is dark, and visible matter such as stars. Key targets for them were huge clouds of cool hydrogen gas, which are invisible but can be detected by the radio telescope. —SR