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Where are they now? Rotary scholarship recipient becomes astrophysicist

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Editor’s Note: This is one in the Sentinel’s “Where Are They Now?” series about Ramona graduates — where they are and what they are doing.

A past recipient of a Rotary Club of Ramona scholarship visited with Rotarians while on vacation in the United States, filling them in on his journey to becoming an astrophysicist.

“He’s one of my star examples of our scholarship program,” Rotarian Chuck LeMenager said of Griffin Foster, a 2003 Ramona High School graduate.

Foster, a research fellow with Rhodes University, is working on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Telescope in Capetown, South Africa.

“It’s a big, massive project that’s going to take decades to build,” he told the Sentinel in an interview after the Rotary Club luncheon meeting last Tuesday.

The project, which could unlock mysteries about the universe, will be the world’s largest radio telescope and involves an international group backed by the United Kingdom and many European countries, he said.

When Foster received the Rotary scholarship after graduating from Ramona High, he headed to University of California, Berkeley, with an undeclared major.

“But shortly after, I took an astronomy course and I was sold on it,” he said.

Foster spent 4-1/2 years at Berkeley, earning two bachelor’s degrees, majoring in physics and astrophysics, and minoring in computer science.

During his time at Berkeley, he worked for a research group, basically building computer boards for radio astronomy, he said.

“Radio astronomy came about after World War II, well during WWII in some ways, because of radar technology,” he explained.

After the war, because many knew about radio signals and electronics, radar technology grew and was applied to science, he said, with some people building simple radio telescopes in their backyards.

“It was a whole new science,” said Foster. “It developed from there and now there are massive telescopes everywhere.”

While with the research group at Berkeley, Foster worked with an international group and drew interest from Oxford University. On a scholarship from the UK government, Foster moved to Oxford in 2009 and spent three years there, earning a doctorate’s degree in astrophysics.

He spent a fourth year working with radio telescopes and on projects in the Netherlands and Italy. It was during that time that he met various people and learned about a big effort to build the telescope in South Africa.

Two years ago he moved to Capetown where the “biggest thing to happen in radio astronomy is being built,” said Foster.

He described a radio telescope as basically looking like a DirecTV dish. In different phases of the SKA, multiple radio telescopes will be connected.

“It’s a way of kind of gluing them together and to basically increase the sensitivity, see further back in time or see fainter objects in space,” he said. “And, so you need a big, vast open area like a desert. So, to build this out...over the next decades they’re building hundreds of thousands of these telescopes which are about 12 meters in size currently,” Foster said.

By comparison, a DirecTV dish is about half a meter in size, he noted.

The SKA has specific science objectives, he said, that includes learning more about the universe and what happened in time. After the Big Bang there were no stars, he said, but there is a gap in time and it is unknown how stars came about.

“That’s one of the first big questions that will be answered,” said Foster.

Astrophysicists know the universe expanded and continues to do so, but recent findings show that the expansion is accelerating and that doesn’t make sense, Foster said. So, the belief is that there is a missing component, he added.

The massive radio telescope project could also help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, also known as SETI, he said.

“The idea is that we send out radio signals all the time, right? We are transmitting, we have TVs, mobile phones, everything we do uses radio waves. And so, if we’re using it, presumably if there’s other life out in the universe, maybe they’re using the same technology we are. And we know how to detect that technology because we use it all the time.”

Over the next 20 years, Foster said, they will not only find more planets, but will learn more about planets, potentially finding some with water and life of some sort.

Foster is the son of the late Mary and Phil Foster. He grew up in San Diego Country Estates, attending James Dukes and Barnett elementary schools. Over the years, he has stayed in contact with LeMenager, who spoke highly of Griffin and his two sisters, calling all three “academic stars.”

“I’m glad to come back and talk,” said Foster, who was headed that afternoon to Temecula to visit his sister, Susan (Foster) Mensior, an early development teacher, and then to New York City to visit his sister, Lauren, a lawyer for the New York Police Department.

Readers with the name of a Ramona graduate for the “Where Are They Now?” series may email maureen@ramonasentinel.com or call 760-789-1350.

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