Astronomy professor John Cowan discovered a super massive black hole at the center of a neighboring spiral galaxy in 1998 and is waiting to study other elements in stars using the out-of-order Hubble Space Telescope. Michelle Gray/The Daily.

In the 1960s, the race to space between the United States and the Soviet Union was in full swing. New technologies were being launched and American children who looked to the sky and saw the moon could catch a glimpse of a satellite passing overhead.

Now, one of those kids is making history in the same field that took his breath away nearly 50 years ago.

“I saw a satellite go over my house, and I was just amazed,” said John Cowan, astrophysicist and astronomy professor. “That’s what got me interested in astronomy.”

He said although he now looks at data instead of space, he’s still as passionate about his field as he was when he started.

“It’s still fascinating, just not as romantic as many people think,” said Cowan, who has been teaching at OU for 30 years.

For some, Cowan is best known for his Introduction to General Astronomy class, but few know about Cowan’s achievements outside of the classroom.

The super massive black hole

While looking for supernovae in 1998, Cowan stumbled upon a super massive black hole at the center of a neighboring spiral galaxy.

Supernovae are large star explosions within a galaxy.

“I’ve discovered supernovae before, but this was my first black hole discovery,” Cowan said.

Cowan’s research on his black hole discovery has helped scientists reach the conclusion that many galaxies have super massive black holes at their centers.

Discovering gold

Shortly after his black hole discovery, Cowan shifted his focus to discovering rare elements in the universe.

In 2002, Cowan and his colleagues discovered gold in a distant star.

“This is real gold like what we have here on the earth,” he said. “But of course, we can’t exactly get rich because not only is it so far away, but it’s also in a star that is over 4,000 degrees Kelvin (6,740.33 degrees Fahrenheit).”

Every star has its own identity, Cowan said, and his job is to analyze individual stars’ compositions.

He said he analyzed the light signatures and the ultraviolet wavelengths coming off the star were the same wavelength of gold.

Although the gold is unreachable, Cowan said his analyses serve a different purpose.

“We are mining these stars from afar so we can analyze what elements were present at the beginning of the universe,” Cowan said.

He said the discovery of gold shows gold was present in early stars around the time the universe began.

Shortly after his first gold discovery, Cowan found gold in a second star.

Current projects

Cowan is set to study elements in other stars with the Hubble Space Telescope, a telescope that orbits above the Earth’s atmosphere to give clearer views of the universe, but the telescope is currently broken.

“I’m waiting on the astronauts to fix it,” Cowan said.

While he waits for Hubble to be fixed this summer, Cowan will work on a Swiss government-sponsored research project on the universe’s elements in Europe.

But on campus, Cowan is preparing for next fall, remembering that his students are his motivation for his work.

“I love walking into the classroom, and teaching people things most of them have never heard of before,” he said. “I like to see the amazement in the eyes of my students when they learn about something new.”