Thursday, July 7, 2016

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• Jane Britton honoured for archival excellence
• A dying satellite's last sights give a new look at the galaxy-shaping power of black holes
• Thursday's notes

Jane Britton honoured for archival excellence

Jane Britton is pictured with former University Librarian Mark Haslett and current Head of Special Collections and Archives Nick Richbell at the Waterloo Regional Heritage Foundation Awards ceremony.

Retired Head of Special Collections and Archives Jane Britton has been named the recipient of the 2015 Sally Thorsen Award of Excellence.

The award, which is given annually by the Waterloo Region Heritage Foundation, goes to a person who has demonstrated, in the course of at least ten years of their professional lives, an outstanding level of commitment to heritage concerns.

Britton more than fits the bill in that regard. She worked as an archivist in Library’s Special Collections and Archives beginning in 1974, and retired as Head of Special Collections and Archives in February 2015.

During her career at Waterloo, Britton developed a depth and breadth of specialized knowledge and expertise around preserving the history of both the University and the community that has won her the recognition of her colleagues and of organizations like the Archives Association of Ontario.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the Library’s archives grew as a result of a robust acquisition program, resulting in hundreds of linear feet of original historical material in a variety of subject areas supporting the University’s teaching and research programs, and it was Britton’s responsibility to make these archives, which included correspondence, diaries, photographs, financial documents, ledgers, maps, and other artifacts, accessible. Britton would catalogue them and make those detailed catalogue descriptions available to researchers in ever-innovative ways as typewritten “finding aids” gave way to sophisticated electronic databases.

From transcribing the 60 years of diary entries made by Louis Jacob Breithaupt into a searchable database to captioning and listing the millions of photographic negatives found in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record Negative Collection, Britton was at the forefront in adapting new technologies to provide detailed access to individual resources.

As her former supervisor (and previous Sally Thorsen Award winner) Susan Saunders Mavor put it, Britton lives by the dictum that “a picture is only worth a thousand words if it has a thousand words attached to it.”

Her work proved invaluable in the research and publication of a number of historical works about the University and the region, including Kitchener: An Illustrated History, Cambridge: The Making of a Canadian City, Waterloo: The Unconventional Founding of an Unconventional University, Out of the Shadow of Orthodoxy: Waterloo@50, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship are in the Waterloo Genome.

“Jane has left a lasting and important mark,” writes recently retired University Librarian Mark Haslett. “She has worked closely with different heritage communities in the Region of Waterloo. She has enabled access to a broad array of heritage materials and ensured that future generations of community members, students and scholars will have enriched access to such materials.”

The University of Waterloo was well represented on the podium at the foundation’s awards ceremony and annual general meeting in mid-June. Along with Britton, former library staff members Susan Saunders Mavor and Jim Parrott received Awards of Excellence, as well as Eric Haldenby of the School of Architecture. Gordon Nelson won the Jean Steckle Award for Heritage Education.

The current Head of Special Collections and Archives, Nick Richbell, was also elected to the heritage foundation’s board of directors.

A dying satellite's last sights give a new look at the galaxy-shaping power of black holes

Launched on February 17, 2016, the Japanese space agency (JAXA) Hitomi X-ray Observatory functioned for about a month before contact was lost and the craft disintegrated. But the data obtained during those few weeks was enough to paint a startling new picture of the dynamic forces at work within galaxies.

“We think that supermassive black holes act like thermostats,” said Brian McNamara, University Research Chair in Astrophysics in the Faculty of Science and a member of ASTRO-H’s Science Working Group. “They regulate the growth of galaxies.”

The new research, published in the journal Nature, reveals just how important the giant black holes in galactic centres are to the evolution of the galaxies as a whole.

The now defunct Hitomi satellite collected X-ray data from the core of the Perseus cluster, one of the largest known structures in the universe. The cluster includes not only the ordinary matter that makes up the galaxies, but an “atmosphere” of hot plasma with a temperature of tens of millions of degrees, as well as a halo of invisible dark matter.

Because plasma is invisible to the eye, and to optical telescopes, it wasn’t until the advent of X-ray astronomy that the full picture began to emerge. The Hitomi observations gave researchers, for the first time, a direct measurement of the turbulent speed of the hot plasma. 

It was at the heart of the cluster’s largest galaxy, NGC 1275, where researchers zeroed in on a black hole which seems to have a huge influence on how the galaxy and how the surrounding hot plasma atmosphere evolve. 

“It’s as though the galaxy somehow knows about this black hole sitting at the centre,” said McNamara. “It’s like nature’s thermostat, that keeps these galaxies from growing. If the galaxy tries to grow too fast, matter falls into the black hole, releasing an enormous amount of energy, which drives out the matter and prevents it from forming new stars.”

So thanks to the black hole’s regulatory effect, the gas that would have formed new stars instead remains a hot plasma.

“This measurement tells us how the enormous energy released by supermassive black holes regulates the growth of the galaxy and the black hole itself,” said McNamara.

Read the full story on the Waterloo News site.

Thursday's notes

The second of two Velocity Fund $5K Finals takes place tonight in QNC 0101. 

Students will deliver startup pitches to a panel of experienced judges in QNC 0101 at 7:00 p.m. Register to attend and get free pizza.

The top 5 finalists from the qualifier events will move on to the Velocity Fund Finals event, which will be held in the Student Life Centre Great Hall on Thursday, July 21 at 11:00 a.m.

A top coat of asphalt will be installed on the Needles Hall service road on Monday, July 11 and Tuesday, July 12, according to a notice from Plant Operations. The existing pavement will be ground up on Friday, July 8. During this time, there will be no entrance to the underground lots or onto the service road from the Ring Road. Parking Services will temporarily relocate all NH lot holders, and access and deliveries to the campus's interior will be on the north side of EV3. One lane of the ring road will be accessible at all times, and a flagperson will be on hand to direct traffic.