The earth is too small for Vicky Kaspi. The Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics and the Lorne Trottier Chair in Astrophysics and Cosmology believes outer space will expand human knowledge.
“Look at how the Copernican revolution affected us,” she reflects. “We used to think the Earth was the centre of everything. The discovery transformed the world view and impacted our lives in philosophical ways, art, religion… it was huge how it affected our view of life.”
Kaspi was drawn to McGill’s Faculty of Science in 2000 by the opportunity to build the University’s astrophysics program from scratch. Since coming here, she has earned a constellation of major awards: the Steacie Prize in the Natural Sciences, the Rutherford Memorial Medal of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Association of Physicists Herzberg Medal, and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Young Explorer Prize. The bonus was the Trottier Chair, which she says truly accelerated astrophysics research by allowing the Faculty of Science to hire postdoctoral students, support seminar series and graduate research, and purchase some equipment.
The focus of Kaspi’s research is some of the universe’s most mysterious objects, including pulsars. Pulsars are the collapsed remnants of small stars that are highly magnetized, extremely heavy and fast rotating. The electromagnetic radiation they emit in the form of radio waves allows astronomers to detect them via an audible, sharp, regular pulse.
When Kaspi and her team deduced the actual nature of a puzzling X-ray pulsar, a rare pulsar with no apparent energy source, in 2002, the astronomy world was electrified. Their discovery dealt convincing evidence of magnetars, a new class of stars that may be powered by the disintegration of ultra-high magnetic fields.
Kaspi is the first to admit that this discovery might seem light years from “how to build a better toaster.” For the future, she says that pulsars are being “patented” as navigation devices for space travel and they now provide better time-keeping than atomic clocks. But for Kaspi, the true value is the way interest in science, curiosity and creativity are stimulated. Observes Kaspi, “There’s not one person who hasn’t looked at the sky and wondered – what is that?”