UCLA political scientists launch one of largest-ever public opinion surveys for run-up to 2020

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As the nation heads into another contentious presidential campaign, what will drive people’s choices? What sacrifices are Americans willing to make to see their preferred politicians take office and their policy preferences take hold?

UCLA political science professors Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch plan to tackle those questions through the 2020 election with an ambitious data-gathering and analysis project called Nationscape. The effort is a partnership with the Washington, D.C.-based Democracy Fund, and the surveys are being fielded by Lucid, a New Orleans-based market research firm.

Every week until the end of 2020, Nationscape will survey 6,250 Americans, asking them to choose between two groups of policy positions and political attributes, among hundreds of other questions.

What makes Nationscape unique is the way it asks respondents to make choices. The survey includes 41 different policy statements and eight hypothetical attributes of potential candidates, all of which are randomized to appear in two sets of issues that voters must choose between. For example, respondents could be asked to choose one of the following sets of statements:

Each bundle of policies and outcomes could contain views that respondents disagree with, mixed with ideas they favor, but Vavreck said posing the questions that way will give researchers a better sense of what really makes the electorate tick.

“We designed the project to learn what people’s priorities are when they are forced to choose among states of the world they want to live in,” she said. “This will help us sort out what is really important to people who, in traditional surveys, tell us they ‘strongly agree’ with all sorts of issues. That response doesn’t really tell us how people will vote if a choice has to be made, and voting is all about making a choice.”

Researchers will share insights and analysis from the surveys regularly throughout election season on Nationscape’s website. By November 2020, the team will have completed a half million interviews — including at least 1,000 interviews in every congressional district.

“Our measurement approach, coupled with the massive scope of the project, will allow us to track both attitude change and shifts in the impact or importance of issues and candidate traits over time and space,” Vavreck said.

Data gathering began in late July. Among the initial findings: Even when Democrats and Republicans agree that children shouldn’t be separated from their parents at the southern border, that there should be a pathway to citizenship for people brought to the U.S. as children, or that the size of the military should be preserved, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to concede on the other issues to preserve their preferred stances on immigration issues, while Republicans are more likely to make tradeoffs to preserve the military.

The results also hint at how people’s priorities change — or don’t — in relation to current events. For example, Vavreck said, few people changed their opinions about the need for universal background checks for gun purchases after the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

“But the importance of that issue changed quite a bit,” she said. “It became significantly more important to people in choosing policy packages after the shootings, even though only about 1.8 percent of them changed their positions on the issue.”

Vavreck is the co-author of critically acclaimed books about the two most recent presidential elections, “The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election” and “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.” She is UCLA’s Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy.

Tausanovitch, an expert on political representation, is the co-principal investigator — along with Chris Warsaw of George Washington University — of the American Ideology Project, which characterizes the conservativism and liberalism of states and voting districts through a 275,000-person survey.

Tausanovitch combed through studies, programs and policies to develop the lists of scenarios that respondents are confronting in the Nationscape surveys. He’s interested in the tradeoffs people are willing to make based on their political leanings and where they come from.

“Data is already demonstrating to us the way people’s attitudes and priorities change in response to events taking place in the country and showing us how Democrats and Republicans prioritize things differently, even when they agree on policies,” Tausanovitch said. “This helps to explain how Americans agree on many things, but also illustrates that their priorities are different.”

The overarching goal of Nationscape is to engender more informed and productive political deliberations, said Joe Goldman, president of the Democracy Fund.

“Nationscape goes beyond horse race polls and battleground states and gets to the real issues that are driving voters and their decisions,” he said. “The unparalleled size and scope of this survey will help us understand how opinions differ across small geographic areas and groups of voters in a way that isn’t possible with traditional surveys, providing a deeper understanding of the electorate in this vital election.”

By the end of the election cycle, Nationscape will have reached people in every state and congressional district, America through Lucid’s platform.

“We were very eager to partner with the UCLA team and help apply their expertise on a scale that reflects the complexity of contemporary American politics,” said Patrick Comer, Lucid’s founder and CEO.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

UCLA astronomer gets best look at first comet from outside our solar system

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The comet 2I/Borisov, as seen on Oct. 12 with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists believe the comet is from another solar system. Photo credit: NASA, ESA and David Jewitt/UCLA

David Jewitt, a UCLA professor of planetary science and astronomy, has captured the best and sharpest look at a comet from outside of our solar system that recently barged into our own. It is the first interstellar comet astronomers have observed.

Comet 2I/Borisov (the “I” stands for interstellar) is following a path around the sun at a blazing speed of approximately 110,000 miles per hour, or about as fast as Earth travels around the sun. Jewitt studied it on Oct. 12 using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, which captured images of the object when it was about 260 million miles away. He observed a central concentration of dust around the comet’s solid icy nucleus — the nucleus itself is too small to be seen by Hubble — with a 100,000-mile-long dust tail streaming behind.

Jewitt said it’s very different from another interstellar object, dubbed ‘Oumuamua, that a University of Hawaii astronomer observed in 2017 before it raced out of our solar system.

“‘Oumuamua looked like a bare rock, but Borisov is really active — more like a normal comet,” said Jewitt, who leads the Hubble team. “It’s a puzzle why these two are so different. There is so much dust on this thing we’ll have to work hard to dig out the nucleus.”

That work will involve sophisticated image processing to separate the light scattered from the nucleus from light scattered by dust.

► View a 2-second time lapse video of the comet

2I/Borisov and ‘Oumuamua are the first two objects that have traveled from outside of our solar system into ours that astronomers have observed, but that’s because scientists’ knowledge and equipment are much better now than they ever have been, and because they know how to find them. One study indicates there are thousands of such comets in our solar system at any given time, although most are too faint to be detected with current telescopes.

Until 2I/Borisov, every comet that astronomers have observed originated from one of two places. One is the Kuiper belt, a region at the periphery of our solar system, beyond Neptune, that Jewitt co-discovered in 1992. The other is the Oort Cloud, a very large spherical region approximately a light-year from the sun, which astronomers think contains hundreds of billions of comets.

2I/Borisov was initially detected on Aug. 30 by Gennady Borisov at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, when it was 300 million miles from the sun. Jewitt said its unusually fast speed — too fast for the sun’s gravity to keep it bound in an orbit — indicates that it came from another solar system and that it is on a long path en route back to its home solar system.

Because the comet was presumably forged in a distant solar system, the comet provides valuable clues about the chemical composition and structure of the system where it originated.

2I/Borisov will be visible in the southern sky for several months. It will make its closest approach to the sun on Dec. 7, when it will be twice as far from the sun as Earth is. By the middle of 2020, it will pass Jupiter on its way back into interstellar space, where it will drift for billions of years, Jewitt said.

Comets are icy bodies thought to be fragments left behind when planets form in the outer parts of planetary systems.

20 new moons for Saturn

In separate research that has not yet been published, Jewitt is part of a team that has identified 20 previously undiscovered moons of Saturn, for a new total of 82 moons. The revised figure gives Saturn more moons than Jupiter, which has 79.

The new objects are all small, typically a few miles in diameter, and were discovered using the Subaru telescope on Maunakea in Hawaii. They can be seen only using the world’s largest telescopes, Jewitt said.

The moons might have formed in the Kuiper belt, said Jewitt, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The research team was headed by Scott Sheppard, a staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and includes Jan Kleyna, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Hawaii.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center: 50 years of providing Native peoples a voice

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This video for Carrying Our Ancestors Home features interviews with UCLA leadership and tribal cultural heritage and repatriation practitioners.

As a quiet darkness descended over the several thousand people gathered between Royce Hall and Powell Library eagerly waiting to celebrate UCLA’s Centennial, a voice broke the silence:

“UCLA acknowledges the Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of the Los Angeles basin. As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relations of the past, present and emerging.”

Those 15 seconds of alumna Cari Champion’s narration for the “Lighting the Way” light and projection show were a culmination of years of work and advocacy from dozens of people, including members of the Tongva community who collaborated with the UCLA American Indian Studies Center. It was also an opportunity for UCLA to demonstrate a commitment to acknowledging the history of the indigenous peoples of Southern California.

“It is an important gesture in Native tradition to ‘place yourself,’” said Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), who in 2018 was named special advisor to UCLA Chancellor Gene Block on Native American and Indigenous affairs. “Introductions and acknowledgements place us in relationship with specific families, nations, geographies, cultural and political lineages. It is something we are taught to do from a young age as an anti-colonial tool to find connections between one other and remember that we are the result of bitter survival.”

The inclusion of the message in such a high-profile public forum — “Lighting the Way” capped the biggest UCLA Alumni Day ever — was for Goeman, who is chair of the American Indian Studies interdepartmental program and former associate director and interim director of the American Indian Studies Center, and her colleagues just a part of their tapestry of the center’s achievements.

The center’s work is not limited strictly to campus, of course. Over the years, people in the American Indian Studies Center have been at the forefront of efforts to build bridges between UCLA as an institution and members of local and state communities of people from indigenous backgrounds, especially the Gabrielino/Tongva, whose ancestors called the Los Angeles basin home for thousands of years before UCLA existed.

Shannon Speed (Chickasaw), director of the center, and Goeman were instrumental in convincing the Los Angeles City Council to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day in 2018.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of UCLA’s four ethnic studies centers, which together make up the Institute of American Cultures. All four were launched in 1969 and designed to invest in research and projects that illuminate the struggles and uplift the experiences of people from marginalized communities.

For the American Indian Studies Center, known as the AISC, that involves embracing students and faculty from multiple indigenous backgrounds, those who continue to make up the smallest numbers in UCLA’s diverse population. Part of the AISC’s inclusive mission is to empower a strong campus community that helps recruit Native students and faculty and once here, support their academic success.

UCLA recognizes the cultural history of the region

Goeman shepherded the creation of the official statement that acknowledges the Tongva people. In August, Block encouraged all campus groups to adopt a form of the following statement at significant public events. (Click on links to hear the Tongva words spoken aloud):

UCLA acknowledges the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovaangar (Los Angeles basin and So. Channel Islands). As a land grant institution, we pay our respects to Honuukvetam (ancestors), ‘Ahiihirom, (elders) and ‘eyoohiinkem (our relatives/relations) past, present and emerging.

The land acknowledgment was used on behalf of UCLA officially for the first time at Bruin Day in April, an event that invites thousands of admitted high school students and their families and caregivers to campus, and the “Lighting the Way” centennial launch in May. American Indian Studies Center leaders and some campus units and professional schools had been incorporating it into their events and materials for a year before that.

“Sometimes if feels like very small steps, but they are important nonetheless, because for many decades, universities didn’t even take small steps at recognitions like this,” Speed said. “And this builds momentum for other policies and programs that consider the needs and desires of tribal communities.”

The American Indian Studies Center is hosting a conference on Oct. 15–16 titled, “Lighting a Path Forward: Land Grants, Public Memory and Tovaangar.” The first day is open to the public and includes a series of presentations on the history of land grant institutions, of which UCLA is one. Other presentations and panel discussions will highlight the state of American Indian education and consider how all of the University of California campuses can continue to forge stronger relationships with tribal communities.

A California tribal listening session includes representatives from the Gabrielino/Tongva, the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians, Chumash, and Acjachemen communities, as well as from the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians and Wintu.

“We want people to come away feeling like they made new connections and collaborations around important issues, and that they understand the responsibility of land grant institutions” Speed said.

A second day of closed workshops, as part Goeman’s special advisor programming, will hopefully yield ideas for white papers that will lay the groundwork for how universities might embrace those responsibilities, by prioritizing best practices that benefits indigenous people to establishing tangible government-to-government relations with tribal nations.

Leading efforts to return remains

For much of its 50-year history, faculty and students affiliated with the American Indian Studies Center have been deeply involved in efforts to return human remains of indigenous people to their ancestors. UCLA has been a leader in repatriations, much of its efforts led by Wendy Teeter, curator of archaeology in the Fowler Museum at UCLA and a lecturer in UCLA’s American Indian studies interdepartmental program.

A website launched this summer called “Carrying Our Ancestors Home” includes a timeline tracking UCLA’s path to almost complete repatriation. Videos featuring interviews with campus leadership and tribal cultural heritage and repatriation practitioners help underscore the powerful impact of repatriation. A large part of this project is giving communities their own space to work out tribal matters around repatriation and providing archival source material online, Goeman said.

The site is meant to help tribes and indigenous people navigate a process that is extremely complex and often met with resistance, Teeter said in May at an event during which she and Goeman launched the website.

In one of his final events as UCLA’s executive vice chancellor and provost of UCLA, Scott Waugh commended the efforts of the AISC to an invited audience from the Native community at that event.

“I know it is important for us to acknowledge where we are in place as well as time, to acknowledge the responsibilities of our shared history,” Waugh said. “I am also well aware that the history between Native peoples and institutions like ours can often be painful. While we cannot ignore our past, we can take steps to shoulder with respect and obligations that history places upon us. We can remember that the beauty of our state — the rivers, the ocean, mountains and deserts — was first experienced by the native and indigenous peoples who watched it before us and were the caretakers of it.”

Geography is something AISC-affiliated faculty take very seriously, knowing that Los Angeles and California are both home to some of the largest populations of humans of American Indian and indigenous descent.

Speed’s approach is to also invite students and faculty to also consider the nature of North American indigeneity at large and for scholars to confront ideas and stories about the indigenous people of Mexico and how their experiences with colonization are interconnected with American identities.

The center has offered critical support in recent years to scholars working on a web project called Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles, which seeks to tell layered stories from the city’s original inhabitants, especially the Gabrelino/Tongva and the Tataviam, as well as indigenous peoples who have come to call Los Angeles home by using digital maps and oral histories.

The AISC is about to embark upon one of its most ambitious research projects to date thanks to a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation that will help a team of researchers affiliated with the center tackle issues of race and water.

Speed, along with professor of anthropology Jessica Cattelino and Aradhna Tripati, professor in the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, will conduct community engaged research on water in the context of global warming in the southwestern United States.

“We’re really hoping this project brings together many disparate communities,” Speed said. “As a community collaboration project, part of what we are trying to do is decolonize the STEM field. With this research we’re bringing de-colonial methodologies into the sciences.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

Picture of Kaplan Hall

50 Years of Comparative Literature at UCLA

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Picture of Kaplan Hall

Kaplan Hall

By Margaret MacDonald (Adapted from an article by Megan Reusche)

This year, coinciding with UCLA’s centennial, the Department of Comparative Literature in the UCLA College celebrates 50 years of interdisciplinary and multilingual research and education in literary studies.

Professor emeritus Arnold Band, an expert in Jewish and modern Hebrew literature, helped establish the program in 1969 along with Ross Shideler, whose expertise was in Swedish and French literature. In the 1970s, two more faculty were appointed: Kathleen Komar, distinguished professor, and Katherine King, professor emerita of comparative literature and classics.

Today, the department is home to 24 faculty with literary, cultural and language expertise that spans the globe.

“Languages are the best way to gain a deeper understanding of other cultures and lives,” Shideler said. “It’s nice to read in translation but it’s really amazing if you know the language.”

Breaking down silos

In the 1970s, comparative literature departments at U.S. universities were a rarity; faculty from English, French, German, and classics departments had few opportunities for intellectual exchange. The creation of the program at UCLA helped break down disciplinary silos and provided a curricular framework for teaching comparative literature.

In the early years, faculty struggled to keep their space on campus and obtain funds for graduate students and programs. The program was authorized as a department in the early 1980s, opening new funding streams that allowed for new faculty hires, curriculum development and increased course offerings.

“It was a challenge convincing the university that comparative literature was a necessary and serious discipline that was different than an individual national literature,” Komar said. “We wanted to ensure that they knew it was crucial to look across national boundaries.”

UCLA’s department has always had diverse and broad expertise, in contrast to more typical comparative literature departments, which are primarily comprised of German, French and English literature scholars. The department also encourages interdisciplinary studies by combining literature with areas such as dance, music and technology.

Band said he is particularly proud of the graduate program.

“We’ve had over 170 graduate students graduate from our department,” he said. “It’s been very satisfying to train them and watch them go out into the world and get good jobs across various fields.”

Adapting to change

Shideler said that the curriculum is constantly being updated and expanded into a wider notion of world literature. Faculty must stay up to date with constantly changing critical theories and current events as well as adapt to changes in areas such as close reading, deconstruction and feminist criticism.

And then there’s technology.

“Technology has changed the way we think about the human component in writing literature,” Komar said. “From blogging and internet diaries that can be written based on fan reactions to cybernetic poets like Ray Kurzweil who create machine-generated poetry, how do we define literature moving forward?”

Read the full article here.

UCLA named No. 1 U.S. public institution by U.S. News & World Report for third consecutive year

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UCLA consistently performs well in a broad range of national and international rankings.

UCLA once again tops the list of U.S. public universities in the U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” rankings, which were published today. This is the third year in a row UCLA has captured this honor.

At just 100 years old, UCLA, which placed No. 20 among all private and public institutions, is the youngest of any public or private institution in the ranking’s overall Top 33.

“We are thrilled to once again be ranked the nation’s top public university, particularly as we celebrate our first 100 years,” Chancellor Gene Block said. “Even as UCLA becomes more competitive, we work hard to remain accessible to exceptional students, faculty and staff from all backgrounds who will help ensure our continued success in UCLA’s second century.”

UCLA also excelled in category-specific rankings published as part of the report. UCLA was ranked No. 1 for economic diversity among the top 25 universities, based on the number of undergraduate students receiving Pell Grants (36 percent at UCLA).

In addition, UCLA was named as the No. 1 public institution among the “best colleges for veterans,” and No. 4 among all universities. In 2018–2019, there were 572 members of the military enrolled at UCLA, the highest among the top 26 schools ranked in the category. UCLA is also among the list of colleges where students incur the least amount of debt.

Four other University of California campuses were among the top 10 public universities in the overall rankings: UC Berkeley (No. 2), UC Santa Barbara (7, tied), UC Irvine (9), and UC San Diego (10). UC Davis placed No. 11.

The top 19 institutions on the list are private universities, led by Princeton and Harvard, with Columbia, MIT and Yale tied for third.

The publication’s methodology includes factors that tend to favor private universities, such as endowment size, rate of alumni giving and student-faculty ratio. It also includes data related to academic reputation, student excellence and student retention and graduation rates, with a particular interest in students from lower income households.

In addition:

  • UCLA tied for No. 7 among U.S. public universities (tied for 11 overall) for ethnic diversity.
  • UCLA tied for No. 8 among public universities’ engineering schools that offer doctorates (tied for 15 overall)

UCLA consistently performs well in a broad range of national and international rankings.

Earlier this month, UCLA was named the No. 1 U.S. public institution in the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings — also for the third year in a row. In addition, UCLA was recently ranked No. 2 among American public universities and No. 11 worldwide among public and private universities in the Academic Ranking of World Universities and the No. 2 U.S. public university (9 overall) in the Times Higher Education Reputation Rankings. In April, UCLA was ranked the No. 4 best-value university by Forbes.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

UCLA is No. 1 public college in 2020 Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education ranking

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For the third consecutive year UCLA has been selected as the No. 1 public institution in the nation in the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings.

In addition, of the more than 800 public and private institutions that were assessed, UCLA placed fifth among all public and private colleges in the area of environment, No. 11 overall in the engagement category, No. 16 in terms of outcomes, and No. 25 overall.

The rankings focus on student success and learning in four key areas: student resources, student engagement, educational outcomes and learning environments. The results are based on data from the Times Higher Education U.S. Student Survey, which collected the opinions of more than 170,000 current university students, government data sources and findings from the Times Higher Education Academic Reputation Survey.

Leading the overall list of colleges were Harvard (No. 1), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (No. 2) and Yale (No. 3). Among leading public universities, UCLA was followed by the University of Michigan, second (No. 27 overall), and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, third (No. 33).

Other University of California campuses included in the Top 10 public universities were UC Berkeley, fourth (No. 34 overall), followed by UC Davis, fifth (No. 36), and UC San Diego, sixth (No. 37).

UCLA consistently performs well in multiple rankings regardless of methodology or criteria. In 2018, UCLA was named the No. 1 U.S. public university in both the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges ranking and Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education survey. UCLA was also named the No. 2 U.S. public university (17 overall) by Times Higher Education in its 2019 World University Rankings and No. 2 (No. 9 overall) in its 2019 World Reputation Rankings.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

Maripau Paz, Inaugural Arthur Ashe Scholar

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UCLA College senior Maripau Paz has been selected as the first ever recipient of the 2019-2020 Arthur Ashe Jr. Scholarship, established to recognize and support students who exemplify the attributes, values, commitment to service and pioneering spirit of the legendary Arthur Ashe ’66.

Since arriving at UCLA as a first-generation college student, Paz has committed herself to inspiring others on campus. Paz has worked in various leadership roles to aid student retention and enhance the undergraduate experience for her peers at UCLA, all while pursuing a double major in political sciences and global studies.

Paz spent three years as the head administrative clerk for New Student Programs in UCLA’s Academic Advancement Program, a federally funded diversity-outreach program that supports low-income students, students of color, first-generation students, and students with disabilities, by connecting them to the resources they need to succeed. In addition, she served for two years as a new student advisor for the incoming Freshman and Transfer Student class, providing academic counsel to more than 200 students and their families.

Paz also served as professional outreach director in the Student Alumni Association, where she helped prepare students for the world post-graduation by hosting workshops on resume building, applying for internships and interview skills. During her senior year, Paz is serving as executive director of the professional development committee on the board of directors for the Student Alumni Association.

On the academic front, Paz presented her research on immigration and public opinion at UCLA’s Undergraduate Research Week in May and is starting work on an honors senior thesis that will further expand on this topic. Following graduation, she plans to pursue a joint Law and Master’s degree in Public Policy and work on issues pertaining to human rights, refugees and immigrant communities.

Read more: https://www.college.ucla.edu/seniorsurvey/2019/08/23/arthur-ashes-most-impactful-serve-the-national-junior-tennis-league/

Black hole at the center of our galaxy appears to be getting hungrier

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Rendering of a star called S0-2 orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It did not fall in, but its close approach could be one reason for the black hole’s growing appetite. Photo credit: Nicolle Fuller/National Science Foundation

The enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy is having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust, and researchers don’t yet understand why.

“We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole,” said Andrea Ghez, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-senior author of the research. “It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don’t know what is driving this big feast.”

A paper about the study, led by the UCLA Galactic Center Group, which Ghez heads, is published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The researchers analyzed more than 13,000 observations of the black hole from 133 nights since 2003. The images were gathered by the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. The team found that on May 13, the area just outside the black hole’s “point of no return” (so called because once matter enters, it can never escape) was twice as bright as the next-brightest observation.

They also observed large changes on two other nights this year; all three of those changes were “unprecedented,” Ghez said.

The brightness the scientists observed is caused by radiation from gas and dust falling into the black hole; the findings prompted them to ask whether this was an extraordinary singular event or a precursor to significantly increased activity.

“The big question is whether the black hole is entering a new phase — for example if the spigot has been turned up and the rate of gas falling down the black hole ‘drain’ has increased for an extended period — or whether we have just seen the fireworks from a few unusual blobs of gas falling in,” said Mark Morris, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and the paper’s co-senior author.

The team has continued to observe the area and will try to settle that question based on what they see from new images.

“We want to know how black holes grow and affect the evolution of galaxies and the universe,” said Ghez, UCLA’s Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics. “We want to know why the supermassive hole gets brighter and how it gets brighter.”

► UCLA astronomers discussed the project in a Keck Observatory video

The new findings are based on observations of the black hole — which is called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* — during four nights in April and May at the Keck Observatory. The brightness surrounding the black hole always varies somewhat, but the scientists were stunned by the extreme variations in brightness during that timeframe, including their observations on May 13.

“The first image I saw that night, the black hole was so bright I initially mistook it for the star S0-2, because I had never seen Sagittarius A* that bright,” said UCLA research scientist Tuan Do, the study’s lead author. “But it quickly became clear the source had to be the black hole, which was really exciting.”

One hypothesis about the increased activity is that when a star called S0-2 made its closest approach to the black hole during the summer 2018, it launched a large quantity of gas that reached the black hole this year.

Another possibility involves a bizarre object known as G2, which is most likely a pair of binary stars, which made its closest approach to the black hole in 2014. It’s possible the black hole could have stripped off the outer layer of G2, Ghez said, which could help explain the increased brightness just outside the black hole.

Morris said another possibility is that the brightening corresponds to the demise of large asteroids that have been drawn in to the black hole.

No danger to Earth

The black hole is some 26,000 light-years away and poses no danger to our planet. Do said the radiation would have to be 10 billion times as bright as what the astronomers detected to affect life on Earth.

Astrophysical Journal Letters also published a second article by the researchers, describing speckle holography, the technique that enabled them to extract and use very faint information from 24 years of data they recorded from near the black hole.

Ghez’s research team reported July 25 in the journal Science the most comprehensive test of Einstein’s iconic general theory of relativity near the black hole. Their conclusion that Einstein’s theory passed the test and is correct, at least for now, was based on their study of S0-2 as it made a complete orbit around the black hole.

► Watch a four-minute film about Ghez’s research

Ghez’s team studies more than 3,000 stars that orbit the supermassive black hole. Since 2004, the scientists have used a powerful technology that Ghez helped pioneer, called adaptive optics, which corrects the distorting effects of the Earth’s atmosphere in real time. But speckle holography enabled the researchers to improve the data from the decade before adaptive optics came into play. Reanalyzing data from those years helped the team conclude that they had not seen that level of brightness near the black hole in 24 years.

“It was like doing LASIK surgery on our early images,” Ghez said. “We collected the data to answer one question and serendipitously unveiled other exciting scientific discoveries that we didn’t anticipate.”

Co-authors include Gunther Witzel, a former UCLA research scientist currently at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy; Mark Morris, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy; Eric Becklin, UCLA professor emeritus of physics and astronomy; Rainer Schoedel, a researcher at Spain’s Instituto de Astrofısica de Andalucıa; and UCLA graduate students Zhuo Chen and Abhimat Gautam.

The research is funded by the National Science Foundation, W.M. Keck Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, Lauren Leichtman and Arthur Levine, and Howard and Astrid Preston.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

What wolves’ teeth reveal about their lives

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Biologist Blaire Van Valkenburgh has spent more than three decades studying the skulls of large carnivores. Here she displays a replica of a saber-toothed cat skull. At left are the skulls of a spotted hyena (in white) and a dire wolf (the black skull). Photo credit: Christelle Snow/UCLA.

UCLA evolutionary biologist Blaire Van Valkenburgh has spent more than three decades studying the skulls of many species of large carnivores — including wolves, lions and tigers —  that lived from 50,000 years ago to the present. She reports today in the journal eLife the answer to a puzzling question.

Essential to the survival of these carnivores is their teeth, which are used for securing their prey and chewing it, yet large numbers of these animals have broken teeth. Why is that, and what can we learn from it?

In the research, Van Valkenburgh reports a strong link between an increase in broken teeth and a decline in the amount of available food, as large carnivores work harder to catch dwindling numbers of prey, and eat more of it, down to the bones.

“Broken teeth cannot heal, so most of the time, carnivores are not going to chew on bones and risk breaking their teeth unless they have to,” said Van Valkenburgh, a UCLA distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who holds the Donald R. Dickey Chair in Vertebrate Biology.

For the new research, Van Valkenburgh studied the skulls of gray wolves — 160 skulls of adult wolves housed in the Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center in Montana; 64 adult wolf skulls from Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior that are housed at Michigan Technological University; and 94 skulls from Scandinavia, collected between 1998 and 2010, housed in the Swedish Royal Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. She compared these with the skulls of 223 wolves that died between 1874 and 1952, from Alaska, Texas, New Mexico, Idaho and Canada.

Yellowstone had no wolves, Van Valkenburgh said, between the 1920s and 1995, when 31 gray wolves were brought to the national park from British Columbia. About 100 wolves have lived in Yellowstone for more than a decade, she said.

In Yellowstone, more than 90% of the wolves’ prey are elk. The ratio of elk to wolves has declined sharply, from more than 600-to-1 when wolves were brought back to the national park to about 100-to-1 more recently.

In the first 10 years after the reintroduction, the wolves did not break their teeth much and did not eat the elk completely, Van Valkenburgh reports. In the following 10 years, as the number of elk declined, the wolves ate more of the elk’s body, and the number of broken teeth doubled, including the larger teeth wolves use when hunting and chewing.

The pattern was similar in the island park of Isle Royale. There, the wolves’ prey are primarily adult moose, but moose numbers are low and their large size makes them difficult to capture and kill. Isle Royale wolves had high frequencies of broken and heavily worn teeth, reflecting the fact that they consumed about 90% of the bodies of the moose they killed.

Scandinavian wolves presented a different story. The ratio of moose to wolves is nearly 500-to-1 in Scandinavia and only 55-to-1 in Isle Royale, and, consistent with Van Valkenburgh’s hypothesis, Scandinavian wolves consumed less of the moose they killed (about 70%) than Isle Royale wolves. Van Valkenburgh did not find many broken teeth among the Scandinavian wolves. “The wolves could find moose easily, not eat the bones, and move on,” she said.

Van Valkenburgh believes her findings apply beyond gray wolves, which are well-studied, to other large carnivores, such as lions, tigers and bears.

Extremely high rates of broken teeth have been recorded for large carnivores — such as lions, dire wolves and saber-toothed cats — from the Pleistocene epoch, dating back tens of thousands of years, compared with their modern counterparts, Van Valkenburgh said. Rates of broken teeth from animals at the La Brea Tar Pits were two to four times higher than in modern animals, she and colleagues reported in the journal Science in the 1990s.

“Our new study suggests that the cause of this tooth fracture may have been more intense competition for food in the past than in present large carnivore communities,” Van Valkenburgh said.

She and colleagues reported in 2015 that violent attacks by packs of some of the world’s largest carnivores — including lions much larger than those of today and saber-toothed cats — went a long way toward shaping ecosystems during the Pleistocene.

In a 2016 article in the journal BioScience, Van Valkenburgh and more than 40 other wildlife experts wrote that preventing the extinction of lions, tigers, wolves, bears, elephants and the world’s other largest mammals will require bold political action and financial commitments from nations worldwide.

Discussing the new study, she said, “We want to understand the factors that increase mortality in large carnivores that, in many cases, are near extinction. Getting good information on that is difficult. Studying tooth fracture is one way to do so, and can reveal changing levels of food stress in big carnivores.”

Co-authors are Rolf Peterson and John Vucetich, professors of forest resources and environmental science at Michigan Technological University; and Douglas Smith and Daniel Stahler, wildlife biologists with the National Park Service.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and National Park Service.

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.

UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández awarded MacArthur Fellowship

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Kelly Lytle Hernández, a 2019 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, is one of 14 UCLA faculty to be chosen for the honor. Photo credit: John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

UCLA professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, an award-winning author and scholar of race, mass incarceration and immigration, was announced today as a recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Lytle Hernández, who is a professor of history and African American studies, is the director of UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, which under her leadership has focused on supporting research into two critical themes in the modern black world — work and justice. The Bunche Center is home to Million Dollar Hoods, which maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. Lytle Hernández is the director and principal investigator on the project.

“Lytle Hernández’s investigation of the intersecting histories of race, mass incarceration, immigration, and cross-border politics is deepening our understanding of how imprisonment has been used as a mechanism for social control in the United States,” the foundation said.

The MacArthur Fellowship is a $625,000, no-strings-attached award to people the foundation deems “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals.” Fellows are chosen based on three criteria: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Lytle Hernández is one of 26 individuals the foundation selected for fellowships in 2019.

“As a scholar, I both work deeply alone and deeply in community, but until very recently the scholarly communities I’ve worked in — immigration and the carceral state — have been fairly separate,” said Lytle Hernández, who holds the Thomas E. Lifka Chair in History at UCLA. “I hope my work has helped people understand immigration as another aspect of mass incarceration in the United States and that my award further helps people understand that these two regimes are intertwined. This award will help us continue this work across communities and shine a light on this kind of thinking that unites these two crises that others often see as distinct.”

Lytle Hernández, 45, received a her bachelor’s degree from UC San Diego in 1996 and earned her doctorate in 2002 from UCLA.

For her first book, “MIGRA! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol,” Lytle Hernández pored over historical records to illuminate the border patrol’s nearly exclusive focus on policing unauthorized immigration from Mexico.

In “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles,” she began zeroing in on another dimension of race and law enforcement, specifically what forces shaped Los Angeles so that it came to operate the largest jail system in the United States.

“What I found in the archives is that since the very first days of U.S. rule in Los Angeles — the Tongva Basin — incarceration has persistently operated as a means of purging, removing, caging, containing, erasing, disappearing and otherwise eliminating indigenous communities and racially targeted populations,” Lytle Hernández said in an interview about the book.

The MacArthur Fellowship, which is commonly referred to as the “genius grant,” is according to the foundation, intended to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual and professional inclinations. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations.

Lytle Hernández joins 13 other UCLA faculty as MacArthur fellows, including mathematician Terence Tao, choreographer Kyle Abraham, director Peter Sellars, astrophysicist Andrea Ghez and historian of religion Gregory Schopen.

While unsure of her specific plans for the award, Lytle Hernández said that she will continue to expand the scope and scale of her social justice scholarship, including with partners outside of UCLA.

“I’d like to create a space for myself and others — especially community organizers and movement-driven scholars — to write,” she said, noting that these people’s calendars tend to be jammed by the “urgency of their work.” “I’d like to create space that allows myself and others to process the work that we’re doing and to share it.”

This article originally appeared in the UCLA Newsroom.