Stephen Shectman blends his celestial interests with his gift of developing novel telescope instrumentation. He investigates the large-scale structure of the galaxy distribution; searches for ancient stars that have few elements; develops astronomical instruments; and constructs large telescopes. Shectman was the former project scientist for Magellan and is largely responsible for the superb quality of 6.5-meter telescopes. He is now a member of the Giant Magellan Telescope Project Scientists’ Working Group.
To understand large-scale structure, Shectman has participated in several galaxy surveys. He and collaborators discovered a particularly large void in the galaxy distribution in the early 1980s and subsequently conducted the Las Campanas Redshift Survey (LCRS) using the C100 fiber spectrograph—a device that collects light, disperses it into spectra to reveal the chemistry and other features. The LCRS was the definitive distance survey of the time and showed that the galaxy distribution becomes homogeneous at large scales compared with the strong fluctuations characteristic of the small-scale distribution.
Hydrogen and helium were produced in the Big Bang, but heavier elements came from nucleosynthesis in successive stellar generations. The oldest stars are deficient in heavy elements, what astronomers call metal-poor. In the 1980s, Shectman and George Preston conducted a survey for these objects. Using novel techniques they discovered the majority of known stars with heavy-element abundances less than about 1% of the Sun’s. Shectman has also worked on metal-poor stars in the Hamburg-ESO survey, using Magellan spectrographs to identify and study the best ones in detail.
Shectman developed a series of photon-counting detectors for faint-object spectroscopy. They were used at Las Campanas and copied by other observatories. He also built the high-resolution echelle spectrograph and the multiobject fiber spectrograph for the 100-inch du Pont telescope. With Rebecca Bernstein, he built the high-resolution echelle spectrograph for Magellan, which has been in service for several years. He is currently working on the Magellan echellette spectrograph, a joint MIT-Carnegie project with Scott Burles (MIT) and Carnegie’s Ian Thompson, and the Magellan Planet Finder, a collaboration with Carnegie’s Paul Butler and Jeff Crane.
Shectman received his B.S. in physics from Yale Univesity and a Ph. D. in astronomy from Caltech where he was also a National Science Foundation fellow. Before joining the Carnegie staff in 1975, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. For more information see http://obs.carnegiescience.edu/users/shec
