As busy as those researchers were, the semester also brought discoveries in green energy, Parkinson’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, concealed handguns and the relationship between children’s happiness and their parents.

Here’s a look at the significant discoveries researchers at The University of Texas at Austin made in fall 2011.

NASA, Texas Astronomers Find a Goldilocks Planet and Others

An artist's conception of Kepler 22b, a planet in its star's habitable zone.

Observations by University of Texas at Austin graduate student Paul Robertson and research scientist Michael Endl eliminated other possible causes of the transit signal using the Harlan J. Smith Telescope. Later, other astronomers found that the planet, called Kepler-22b, is just 2.4 times the size of Earth and may be as much as 20 times Earth’s mass.

Pair of Black Holes ‘Weigh In’ at 10 Billion Suns, the Most Massive Yet

Artist's conception of stars moving in the central regions of a giant elliptical galaxy that harbors a supermassive black hole. (Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook).

The team measured the black holes’ masses by combining observations of the fast-moving stars at their hearts made with the giant Gemini and Keck telescopes in Hawaii with observations of their diffuse outer regions (called the “dark halo”) using the George and Cynthia Mitchell Spectrograph on the 2.7-meter Harlan J. Smith Telescope at The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory.

Astronomers Find Unusual Multi-planet Solar System

A team of researchers led by Bill Cochran of The University of Texas at Austin used the Kepler space telescope to discover an unusual multiple-planet system containing a super-Earth and two Neptune-sized planets orbiting in resonance with each other.

Evidence for “Great Lake” – potential place for life — found on Europa

A cross-section of what the subsurface lake on Europa might look like, with Saturn on the horizon.

Many more such lakes might exist throughout the shallow regions of Europa’s shell, lead author Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics, writes in the journal Nature.

Further increasing the potential for life, the newly discovered lake is covered by floating ice shelves that seem to be collapsing, providing a mechanism for transferring nutrients and energy between the surface and a vast ocean already inferred to exist below the thick ice shell.

Discovery of a ‘dark state’ could mean a brighter future for solar energy

The efficiency of conventional solar cells could be significantly increased, according to new research on the mechanisms of solar energy conversion from chemists at The University of Texas at Austin.

“Parkinsonian” worms might be key to drugs for Parkinson’s disease

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have devised a simple test, using dopamine-deficient worms, for identifying drugs that may help people with Parkinson’s disease.

Memory-enhancing drug might improve exposure therapy for PTSD patients

A memory-enhancing drug may improve the speed and effectiveness of prolonged exposure therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients, according to a new pilot study by psychologists at The University of Texas at Austin and other institutions.

Researchers Develop Optimal Algorithm for Determining Focus Error in Eyes and Cameras

University of Texas at Austin researchers have discovered how to extract and use information in an individual image to determine how far objects are from the focus distance, a feat only accomplished by human and animal visual systems until now.

Like a camera, the human eye has an auto-focusing system, but human auto-focusing rarely makes mistakes. And unlike a camera, humans do not require trial and error to focus an object.

Johannes Burge, a postdoctoral fellow in the College of Liberal Arts’ Center for Perceptual Systems and co-author of the study, says it is significant that a statistical algorithm can now determine focus error, which indicates how much a lens needs to be refocused to make the image sharp, from a single image without trial and error.

Appalachian tiger swallowtail butterfly is a hybrid species

The Appalachian tiger swallowtail butterfly evolved through the hybridization of Eastern and Canadian swallowtails.

“How new species form is one of the central questions in evolutionary biology,” says Krushnamegh Kunte, a post-doctoral research fellow at Harvard who began his research as a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. “Hybrid speciation is more common in plants, but there are very few cases in animals. This study may create the fullest picture we have to date of hybrid speciation occurring in an animal.”

Why Texas women have concealed handguns licenses

Texas women who hold concealed handgun licenses are motivated to do so by feelings of empowerment and a need for self-defense, according to research by University of Texas at Austin researchers.

Middle-aged parents only as happy as their least happy grown child

Despite the fact that middle-aged parents are no longer responsible for their grown children, the parents’ emotional well-being and life satisfaction remain linked to those children’s successes and problems — particularly their least-happy offspring, research from The University of Texas at Austin shows.

Peter Shelus was visiting The University of Texas at Austin campus in 1971, attending an astronomy conference. More important, he was looking for a job.

He was completing a post-doc assignment at the Manned Space Center (now Johnson Space Center) in Houston and job prospects weren’t great. NASA was laying off scientists and engineers as the basic Apollo program wound down.

It was a Friday afternoon and Shelus waited for the elevator in the Castilian apartment building. But before the doors opened, Darrell Mulholland from the university approached Shelus and said, “I hear you’re looking for a job.”

Besides a slow elevator, Shelus can also thank Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin for the job he’s had for 38 years.

The retroreflector placed on the moon by the Apollo 11 astronauts.

Shelus’s job was to process the information coming from the new Lunar Laser Ranging Station at McDonald Observatory, the source of the laser beam.

Since then, four other retroreflectors have been placed on the Moon. Two by other Apollo missions 14 and 15 and two French-made mirrors carried to the surface by Soviet Union soft landers.

Now, in a matter of bittersweet timing, The University of Texas at Austin’s role in the lunar laser ranging project is ending as the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11 is marked.

The National Science Foundation (NSF), which provided support for the project when NASA dropped it more than 15 years ago, has notified Shelus that the $135,000 for the McDonald Laser Ranging System (MLRS) won’t be renewed.

“We’re essentially going out of business by probably the end of the calendar year,” Shelus said.

He understands the NSF decision—for the most part.

“We know what the lunar science is, we know the MRLS is on its last legs,” he acknowledged. The system is 20 years old and has had few upgrades.

What’s more, a brand new station is coming online in New Mexico and a French installation will re-open after shutting down for refurbishing.

Still, Shelus would like to keep his project going for another two years to collect data that overlap across the three laser stations.

“I’ve been here since 1971 so I’ve been here almost the entire 40 years. It’s been a fantastic ride,” he said. “We’ve put good data on the table, we’ve kept the experiment going and there are no regrets.”

The precise measurements of the moons orbit enabled a range of science projects.

One of the biggest science accomplishments was to test the Equivalence Principal, one of the fundamental concepts in which Albert Einstein built the General Theory of Relativity.

Among specific findings, according to NASA, the laser ranging project showed that:

• the moon is spiraling away from Earth at a rate of 3.8 centimeters a year because of the Earth’s ocean tides.

• the moon probably has a liquid core.

• the universal force of gravity is very stable. Newton’s gravitational constant G has changed less than one part in 100-billion since the laser experiments began.

Just because the Moon will no longer be a target, it doesn’t mean that the Laser Ranging Station is shutting down. Shelus and Jerry Wiant, the project’s engineer, and Randy Ricklefs, the software expert, still have work to do. Ken Harned and Anthony Garcia are observers on the laser.

The station is part of a worldwide network of lasers that bounce laser beams off satellites. What’s more, it will be involved with the two moon missions, LCROSS and LRO, launched by NASA in June.

My wife and I topped off a trip to Big Bend National Park by attending a Star Party at the observatory on Nov. 8. We had a quick dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Fort Davis and drove the 17 winding miles to the observatory. We knew we were getting close when we saw two white telescope domes basking in the moonlight.

We were two of the about 230 visitors at the party that night, an unusually high number for that time of year.

The party begins with the group gathered in the dark in the outdoor amphitheater near the visitors center. The temperature was in the 40s, but if you dress appropriately (it’s about the layers), you’ll be OK.

Frank Cianciolo, senior program coordinator at the Bash Visitors Center at the observatory, started things off with a talk that touched on several celestial subjects and pointed out several heavenly bodies.

He told the story of Perseus and Andromeda and how the ancient Greeks might have employed those constellations and others to depict that tale and others that make up so much of Greek mythology.

He also pointed out the things we would look at through telescopes arrayed outside the visitors center.

They were the Moon, Jupiter, the Ring Nebula (Messier 57), the Perseus Double Cluster (NGC 869 and NGC 884) and the Pegasus Cluster (Messier 15).

The Pegasus cluster was the farthest at 33,600 light years away. That means the light that we saw left the cluster 33,600 years and six days ago (as of this posting).

Why were those chosen?

“We tend to pick those objects that are reasonably large or large enough to show some detail through the telescope,” Cianciolo said. “We also pick objects that most folks will have a reasonable chance of being able to see.”

The staff did a great job of explaining what we were looking at, how far away it was and other questions that might have strained the composure of less patient people.

The longest and slowest line was the one for viewing the moon. That people would linger longer looking at the lunar surface was completely understandable once I got my eye on it. The Moon’s features could be seen in great detail.

“With constantly changing patterns of light, the Moon is an infinitely fascinating subject,” Cianciolo said.

The observatory has offered public viewings since University of Chicago astronomers went to the Fort Davis area to scope out the best peaks for astronomy. The Star Party is one of the observatory’s many outreach efforts.

It helps that astronomy is a somewhat accessible science: All you have to do is look up.

And a Star Party at McDonald Observatory, away from the big city lights, is a great place to do it.