Professor shows students way to stars

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The average American measures distances in inches, feet and miles — a mile seemingly long compared to an inch. However, to astrophysicist Timothy Beers a mile seems like nothing, as he has spent his career measuring distances in light years.

Beers, a university distinguished professor of physics and astronomy, spends his time looking to the vast cosmos of space in search of stars. His goal is to trace the origins of our galaxy and the universe — for this, he has been called a stellar archeologist.

“(The people I work with and I) are very interested in the origins of the elements and how the stars in which we believe are responsible for building the first elements did that, number one,” Beers said.

“Second, how we can sort of read back the detective story of what those processes left behind — the evidence.”

Beers has spent a great bulk of his career looking for the earliest formed stars in our galaxy, which represent only a very small fraction of stars around today.

The most valuable stars to his research are the most rare — appearing just once in a million amid the one hundred billion stars in our galaxy.

“It’s a long, arduous road, as you can imagine, but it’s paid off,” he said. “We’ve made a lot of fundamental discoveries not about just individual stars but also about our galaxy itself.”

His studies have sent him all over the world for conventions, talks and research. Beers has taken about 30 trips to an observatory in Chile and recently spent four months in Canberra, Australia, on a sabbatical.

“It is interesting in the sense that there are very few places on the Earth, or at least there are very few countries, where I don’t know someone,” he said. “If I wanted to say, visit Paris or something just for personal reasons, I could combine that with a professional engagement if I wanted to.”

While globe-trotting to observatories is a journey for Beers, getting his job at MSU was nothing short of a journey in itself.

After graduating from Purdue University, Beers went to Harvard for his graduate studies and then the California Institute of Technology for his postdoctoral research, giving the experience of studying across the entire U.S.

“That’s the funny thing about it — people always talk about physicians, dentists and what, and they say, ‘maybe they deserve to get paid that much, at least some of them, because all the years of schooling,’ and I’m thinking, ‘there’s got to be a better reason for that.’”

Following in footprints similar to Beers, graduate student Catherine Kennedy enjoys working with him because he uses his connections to get his students involved.

“He takes really good care of his grad students,” Kennedy said. “He makes sure that we’re really involved in the science — really introduces us to lots of very important people in our line of work.”

Kennedy also said she loves Beers’ passion for the material.

“He’s not just successful, he’s not just smart and he’s not just good at what he does — he genuinely is really excited about everything that he’s studying,” she said.

Young Sun Lee, a former graduate student of Beers who now is doing his postdoctoral research with him, has
appreciated working with the professor because of the research ideas he develops.

Together, they are working on developing a pipeline to process stellar spectra, to better understand star composition, location and orbit with the goal of understanding our galaxy’s origins.

With 10 to 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, astronomers regularly are faced with the question “how small does the universe make me feel?”

For Beers it’s a size smaller than anyone, even himself, can imagine.

“People, even astronomers, don’t often ponder too long on that question,” he said. “There’s no doubt that even if we study this as intensely as we do, the human mind cannot grasp the kind of volume that we’re talking about.”

Beers has enjoyed awards, honors and travel, but said his career wouldn’t be what it is without the people he works with.

“I’ve had the chance to work with a lot of very smart people, and it makes an enormous difference … that just pushes the work along so much faster when you have good people to work with,” he said.

“If I had to do all of this in the absence of the interactions with the colleagues, that would be a lot less satisfying.”

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