2 - Looking back in time: Searching for the most distant galaxies

Summary

Esther Hu was born and raised in New York City. She is a second generation Chinese-American whose parents came to the US as students at the end of the Second World War. Like her sister Evelyn, Esther decided to be a scientist before attending college. Esther was educated in physics at MIT and earned her PhD in astrophysics at Princeton. She then became a research associate with the X-ray group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and then a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute. She is now a professor of astronomy at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. In the course of her career, Esther has studied successively more distant objects across the Universe using more and more sensitive telescopes and instruments. Despite her friendly and easy-going nature, Esther is as competitive as they come; she presently holds the record for distant object detection. Esther enjoys reading, classical music, and “living in a place as beautiful as Hawaii.”

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

L.P. Hartley

When I was seven, at my first school book fair, I came away with a title, Insight into Astronomy. The “pull” behind the choice came from the quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the preface: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance …”