In high school Anna Ho became so fascinated with neuroscience that she wrote to neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, asking whether he needed an intern. A representative for Sacks politely declined, she recalls, but encouraged her to pursue her passions. She did, and it led her on a transformative journey into space science.
Ho is now an assistant professor at Cornell University working on astronomical transients—brief, often violent events that flare into view and then vanish on timescales of months, days or even minutes. She uses telescopes spanning the electromagnetic spectrum on the ground and in space to study these objects before they disappear.
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These objects are given unwieldy labels such as “luminous fast blue optical transients”—flashes of brilliant blue far brighter and briefer than a typical supernova—but they’re better known by the whimsical names Ho and other scientists assign to them. There is the Cow (named after its official designation, AT2018cow), a burst some 100 times brighter than a supernova that dimmed in just a few days instead of the usual weeks.
Jeffery DelViscio
And there is the Tasmanian Devil (AT2022tsd), which repeatedly flared brighter than an exploding star for mere minutes at a time—something that left Ho “stunned beyond words” when she first saw it. “I’ll remember that for a long time,” she says. “That was probably the most surprised I think I’ve ever been in my profession.”
Discovering astronomical transients requires rapid mobilization among collaborators at observatories around the world. Ho’s ability to pull off these campaigns is renowned among her colleagues. What she and her collaborators have observed tells us more about how matter and energy propagate through extreme environments.
The result is a deeper understanding of how massive stars live and die—and more work to do. “Right now I would say that my work has raised more questions than it has answered!” Ho says.
This article is part of “The Young American Scientists,” an editorially independent project that was produced with financial support from Regeneron.