Philip R. Goode

Goode conceived, designed, raised the funds for, assembled the team, and led the construction of the first facility-class, ground-based optical solar telescope built in the U.S. in a generation.

The telescope enjoyed first light in January 2009 and was the world’s largest aperture solar telescope until DKIST enjoys first light in December 2019. The telescope was named the Goode Solar Telescope (GST) in July 2017. More than 150 publications have used GST data since its first light until 2020. The off-axis GST is outfitted with three state-of-the-art spectro-polarimeters covering visible up to mid-infrared wavelengths. Since 2010, the GST has been in regular operation with high order adaptive optics (AO) corrected light feeding state-of-the-art Fabry-Perot, visible and near-IR light, spectro-polarimeters in which the GST was used in a series of high resolution observations elucidating unforeseen, significant solar dynamics. In 2016, the BBSO multi-conjugate AO (MCAO) project succeeded in making the first-ever MCAO-corrected observations of the Sun that showed a clearly/visibly widened (roughly trebled) corrected field of view compared to quasi-simultaneous observations with classical adaptive optics.[1] The BBSO MCAO system, called Clear, is characterized by three deformable mirrors (DMs) conjugated to different altitudes above the GST. Clear is now a facility instrument in BBSO holding lock as well as its single DM antecedent (classical AO). Goode was the principal investigator (PI) on all the aforementioned projects in BBSO and his current efforts are concentrated on adaptive optics in the near IR and are funded by NSF-AST.

Active in helioseismology for over twenty years beginning in the early 1980s. The efforts in which he was involved include the first determinations of the Sun’s internal rotation,[2] its internal differential rotation[3] and determining limits on buried magnetic field and demonstrating that the Sun rotates on a single axis,[4] determining the Sun’s seismic radius.[5] Observationally, Goode led the effort that ultimately showed solar oscillations are driven, in part, by the noise made in the ubiquitous, continuous collapses of the dark inter-granular lanes.[6] Also in the 1990s, he teamed to develop a seismic model of the Sun's interior, which was used to place strong limits on solar opacities and nuclear-reaction cross sections in the p-p chain, as well as demonstrating that there is no astrophysical solution to the sun’s neutrino deficit but rather the deficit is in the province of particle physics, which was subsequently shown experimentally. Further, the seismic age of the Sun (4.6 GY) was determined and is the first confirmation of the age of the solar system from meteorite data.[7] In his last work in helioseismology, it was determined, self-consistently, that the Sun's surface shrinks and cools by insignificant amounts as the activity cycle rises from minimum to maximum after a complex competition between thermal and magnetic effects in the Sun’s outermost layers.[8] This last work overlapped in time with the beginning of the construction of the GST.

The Earth’s climate depends critically on its reflectance. Project Earthshine (PE) led by Goode in Big Bear for nearly twenty years reported in 2001 the first modern measurement of Earth’s albedo (~0.30)[9] and later the PE team reported sixteen years of terrestrial albedo variations in which the variations were precisely consistent with overlapping (2000-2013) CERES (Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System) satellite data with the same inter-annual variations. The Earth’s reflectance shows no climatologically significant trend over the period of 1998-2014.[10]

His earliest work was in theoretical nuclear physics (1967-1982) in which he concentrated on the nature of the nucleon-nucleon interaction inside a nucleus. He also explained a number of experimentally measured dynamical phenomena of nuclei, like why 56Ni decays so slowly.[11] It is the energy from this unexpected anomaly of a doubly magic nucleus decaying that cause Type I supernovae to shine.

Among 32 current and past students and postdocs Goode supervised, 16 have moved on to faculty/national center tenure track/tenured positions. Senior among them are Thomas Rimmele (DKIST Director) and Enric Pallé (former Director of Research at Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias), as well as leaders of solar groups around the world including Peter Gallagher (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies), Jongchul Chae (Seoul National University), Haisheng Ji (Purple Mountain Observatory, Nanjing), Carsten Denker (Astrophysical Inst. Potsdam), Haimin Wang (Chief Scientist, BBSO) & Wenda Cao (Director, BBSO).

In the mid-1990s, Goode founded the Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (CSTR) at NJIT (originally called the Center for Solar Research until the addition of the terrestrial component in 2002). Goode grew the NJIT solar-terrestrial program from a single faculty member to seven tenured solar-terrestrial faculty with facilities in California (Big Bear Solar Observatory and the Frequency Agile Solar Radiotelescope array in Owens Valley), South America (Fabry-Perot interferometers to probe the terrestrial atmosphere under the equatorial electrojet), geospace instrumentation across Antarctica (i.e., at the South Pole and McMurdo Stations, and at the Automatic Geophysical Observatories (AGOs) deployed across the continental ice-shelf, the Jeffer Observatory at Jenny Jump State Forrest in NJ (which includes a molecular/aerosol lidar system and 48” optical telescope), and automated earthshine telescopes in Big Bear and Tenerife. Most recently, CSTR is the PI institution for medium energy ring current particle instruments flying on the twin NASA Van Allen Belt Probe spacecraft.

Goode was the founding director and led CSTR from 1995-2014 and BBSO from its transfer from Caltech to NJIT in 1997 to 2013. He chaired the NJIT physics department from 1984-1990 building the applied physics degree programs.

Goode won three varsity letters in swimming at Cal-Berkeley and held multiple school records in the butterfly and medley relay in the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, he competed in master’s swimming and won multiple U.S. national championships in the butterfly, individual medley, and distance freestyle.