The following is based on a collection of graduate student experiences, focusing on the perspectives of students at U.S. institutions. Information on university reopening plans and COVID-19 is up-to-date as of early July 2020, but may have changed due to the quickly evolving nature of this pandemic. For medical information on COVID-19, please refer to the CDC and WHO.

A few months ago, the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 leapt to the forefront of our national consciousness. COVID-19, the highly infectious disease caused by this new coronavirus, began to spread in communities in the United States and across the globe. In response, entire countries shut down, advising citizens to stay in their homes to slow transmission and flatten the curve to avoid overwhelming healthcare systems. Universities scrambled to make changes, with many institutions transitioning to online learning in a matter of days or weeks. Many students were told to leave campuses, finishing out the school year in their family homes.

Now, as we approach the fall term, universities are planning for what comes next. Some states have reopened their businesses and relaxed stay-at-home orders, leading to increased cases of COVID-19 across the country. Universities are considering how they, too, will reopen, and if/how they will safely bring students back on campus for Fall 2020. As graduate students we are deeply concerned with how universities will operate and how we (as students, researchers, and teaching assistants) will be impacted by COVID-19 this fall. In todays Beyond bite, we will explore the variety of current university reopening plans and graduate student concerns surrounding those plans.

Before we jump into how universities are tackling this issue of reopening, its important to understand the current situation in the U.S. Although some countries like New Zealand have effectively halted the spread of COVID-19, the United States has seen cases rise dramatically (see Figure 1), currently holding the highest case counts in the world with over 3 million confirmed cases according to the WHO. (For context, as of 6/30/2020, the U.S. had 4% of the worlds population and 25% of its COVID-19 cases.) The fatality rate of COVID-19 is around 0.6-1% overall according to current studies, and the hospitalization rate is ~10-11%. The data have shown that people 65 and older, as well as people of color (particularly Native American, Black, and Latinx communities), are at higher risk for COVID-19.

Even in cases where the patient survives and recovers, they have been left with life-changing effects, such as decreased lung capacity, strokes, and more. To make matters worse, cases that dont show serious symptoms can still be left with long-term lung damage. Over 100,000 Americans have already died from this pandemic, and infection rates are spiking in many states. There is a lack of contact tracing, widespread testing, and other efforts that countries have used to control the spread. Current scientific consensus shows that the virus is transmitted by respiratory droplets, even by asymptomatic folks, and also possibly through the air. As a result, gatherings indoors are more risky due to a lack of space for distancing and less air flow. While mask wearing and washing your hands is useful (but not foolproof) in reducing the spread, isolation is the most surefire way to avoid infection. Maintaining distancing, implementing contact tracing and testing, and enforcing these safety protocols seems challenging in a university setting, where students often gather in groups to study and socialize. With these facts in mind, how are universities going to serve tens of thousands of students in the fall and keep everyone safe?

The United States has so far lacked cohesive national guidance during this pandemic, leaving decisions for reopening plans and public health guidance to the state (and even city) levels of government. For many people, there has been a large amount of uncertainty about what activities are allowed by their local rules, and, beyond that, what is actually safe. So far, it seems like universities are adding to this patchwork quilt of reopening plans, with a huge variance in what individual institutions are planning to do this fall (see Figure 2 for a summary). Most plans seem to offer some sort of hybrid in-person and virtual instruction, although the details of these plans vary wildly. Additionally, these plans were recently thrown into disarray by the ICE decision regarding international students, which has thankfully now been rescinded.

Many universities have been committed to offering in-person instruction as much as possible. For example, Boston University stated in a memo to deans and department chairs that any course that does not have a significant in-person component incrementally erodes the residential character of the BU experience. Their plan, titled Learn from Anywhere (LfA), sets in-person instruction as the default for course delivery, with options for virtual teaching for students who cannot or do not wish to attend in-person. The University of Michigan stated that it will have an in-person public health informed semester without giving significant detail on what that means, only generally stating that large classes will be held remotely, small classes will be held in-person, and medium-size classes will be a hybrid of the two. The Chancellor of NC State University, in a memo sent to deans, directors, and department heads, requested an increase in the number face-to-face and hybrid courses being offered. The University is planning to have lecture classes of up to 100 students with a proposed classroom spacing of 46 feet. (Dr. Katie Mack, a physics professor there, wrote a response letter to this memo, detailing why this plan is a mistake.)

Another strategy has been shifting schedules to accommodate fractions of the campus population at different times. For example, Columbia University plans to have a three term schedule with freshman and sophomores on campus in fall, and juniors and seniors on campus in Spring. University of Massachusetts Amherst has shifted to start classes 2 weeks early, and a few schools are holding in-person classes until Thanksgiving, after which theyll go entirely online. Some plans are intentionally vague and leave decisions up to departments, or even individual instructors, and some are a bit unconventional. A rare few schools have plans that seem possibly safe, such as UCLA, where they expect most classes to be online except those that petition for a need to be in-person, and have sent rigorous emails detailing plans for safety protocols (including contact tracing and widespread testing) on campus. The University of Vermont has adopted a model that gives students the choice to stay home and take virtual classes, allowing them to determine their own risk and comfort level about being physically on campus (however, only 40% of classes will be available online). Harvard has fully committed to 100% online courses.

Although there are many variations of university reopening plans, there are a few themes that appear frequently, listed below.

The general consensus surrounding these plans seems to be that students are terrified and concerned that the results will be disastrous. Students are frustrated with the confusing, conflicting information theyve been given about university reopening, and the sometimes convoluted new schedules and rules theyve been given about what to expect next school year.

For undergraduates, the scarcity of housing at some institutions (due to lower capacity to ensure social distancing) poses an issue for students. For those that would be living in the dorms, there are significant concerns about safety and maintaining distancing in such a tightly packed space. Many students have expressed that paying full tuition and campus fees when many campus services arent being offered seems unfair, even starting petitions for tuition reimbursement or reduction.

The major problem with current plans is that many of them simply arent realistic. Do we really expect all students to comply? In this pandemic, even one rogue infected person (particularly a super-spreader) can spread COVID-19 to classmates, dormmates, and friends without even knowing it. As a result, compliance is required for everyone in the community for anyone to stay safe. This is a problem when students have already been gathering more, spurred by the idea that as young people theyre lower risk, some going as far as having COVID parties which act as contests and sometimes offer money to the first person who gets the disease. Additionally, colleges are filled with high-risk areas for COVID-19, such as the crowded and high contact areas of dorms, dining halls, community bathrooms/facilities, and classrooms. In order to make these spaces safe, the measures that will have to be implemented significantly degrade the residential experience that colleges are desperately trying to cling to. If the importance of in-person classes is to have the quintessential college experience, these plans are missing the point; with rigorous distancing in classrooms, significantly reduced social activities and student group meetings, and strict quarantines in dorms, the college experience of close collaboration and intense social bonding just isnt happening.

Given that most schools are attempting some hybrid format, this leads to the question: how do you coordinate students in-person and online simultaneously? Also, with infection rates rising in 46 states, it is definitely possible that schools will have to abruptly close again, leaving us in the same unprepared and haphazard state we found in March. Students may once again have to hurriedly leave campus, or at least return to fully online classes with no in-person contact. What happens then if classes have to switch to fully virtual again? Both these scenarios require significant extra labor on the part of the instructor and TAs and could cause disruption to the student learning experience. Abruptly switching to online or wrangling both Zoom participants and students in a distanced classroom is a logistical nightmare, and also seems like it would be an all-around lower quality education than if instructors were allowed to dive in to making solid online curricula. Its also very difficult for instructors to plan for classes when schools havent made decisions on schedules and course delivery methods; university leadership is acting as if they can make a last minute decision and faculty can accommodate anything, whereas in reality, it takes time to create an excellent online course.

All around, students are not being well served by many current university plans. This leads to the question of who benefits from these convoluted reopening schemes. University budgets, like other economic sectors, are hurting from the pandemic. However, leading students to feel like theyre being exploited and put at risk for their tuition dollars is unacceptable. On the other hand, a handful of universities (such as the University of Vermont) are genuinely trying to have a conversation with their communities and find what options will best support students, an example that more institutions should follow.

Many of the university plans give information on what undergraduate students can expect for fall and how they will be offered the courses they need to finish their degree. However, these same plans often leave out graduate students, especially student workers (e.g. teaching assistants (TAs) and graduate researchers). Graduate students are in a unique position of being not quite just a student, but not quite an employee either; as a result, university plans are uniquely hard to navigate for graduate students. For example, West Virginia University has a FAQs page for faculty and one for studentswhere would grad students fall in that categorization?

One of the biggest issues facing graduate students is TAs being forced to teach in-person classes, face-to-face with many students, unless they have a specific medical exemption. Given the power dynamics of graduate school, even under normal circumstances its often difficult for students to challenge departmental decisions without risk of hurting their futures in academia; now, its literally life or death, as some universities will rescind pay and healthcare benefits from TAs not willing to risk teaching or holding office hours in-person.

For those who do end up teaching in campus classrooms, its unclear how much of the burden of safety enforcement will fall on instructors. With no clear plans for how mask wearing, social distancing, and symptom monitoring will be enforced, there is a risk that these responsibilities will fall to those, especially TAs, who are already vulnerable in classrooms and dont have a lot of power to ensure compliance. Some universities omitted detailed guidance for graduate student researchers, expecting them to return to campus and make safety plans with their individual departments or even their individual advisors. Although allowing departments and research groups to make their own safety decisions allows for flexibility to fit each individual situation, it also leaves graduate student researchers without important protections for their health and job security.

For graduate students in particular, theres the additional stress of not only being an employee, but also having to make progress towards a degree. Qualifying and comprehensive exams and PhD defenses, extremely stressful exams even in normal times, are now being moved online, forcing students to prepare for and take these exams while dealing with the additional hurdles of working-from-home and stresses from dealing with the pandemic. Students are working with overburdened advisors who are juggling their usual responsibilities while being at home with their families, plus having more faculty meetings than usual to plan for the uncertain future. The additional stress of the pandemic has impacted student mental health, especially for graduate students who already face a multitude of mental health problems. A few departments, like WVUs Physics department, have made adjustments to degree schedules, essentially stopping the clock on qualifying exam timelines to acknowledge that we are in a unique time and should not try to proceed as usual given the circumstances. Similarly, UCLAs Astronomy Division delayed comprehensive exams to accommodate how students needed extra time to prepare due to the effects of the pandemic.

Overall, graduate students are grappling with uncertainty on all frontsin the courses theyre taking, their research work, the classes they teach, their degree milestones, their health in this pandemic, and even their future career prospects.

Undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty and staff have been (or will be) negatively affected by many of the policies laid out by universities attempting to bring us back to a state of pre-pandemic normalcy. The authors of this piece strongly believe we would all be better off if we acknowledged our current situation and adapted to it instead of forcing things to resemble the pre-pandemic world, a world which simply no longer exists. Universities must do better, and create realistic plans based on the safety and wellbeing of their undergraduates, grad students, faculty, and staff.

Information on school plans for Fall 2020, when not otherwise linked, was sourced from communication with graduate students who wish to remain anonymous.

Beyond astro-ph articles are not necessarily intended to be representative of the views of the entire Astrobites collaboration, nor do they represent the views of the AAS or all astronomers. While AAS supports Astrobites, Astrobites is editorially independent and content that appears on Astrobites is not reviewed or approved by the AAS.

Thank you to the other members of the Astrobites team who helped make this piece possibleespecially Haley Wahl, Sanjana Curtis, Ellis Avallone, and Jenny Calahan!

About Briley LewisBriley Lewis is a second-year graduate student and NSF Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Astronomy & Astrophysics. Her research interests are primarily in planetary systems both exoplanets and objects in our own solar system, how they form, and how we can create instruments to learn more about them. She has previously pursued her research at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, and also at Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD. Outside of research, she is passionate about teaching and public outreach, and spends her free time bringing together her love of science with her loves of crafting and writing.

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COVID-19 in Fall 2020: A Concerning Situation for Students - Astrobites

Posted on Jul 16, 2020 in Astronomy, Black Holes

With our new identifications weve found a bunch of heavily obscured black holes that had previously been missed, said astrophysicist Erini Lambrides of Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Baltimore, Maryland, about the discovery of a type of growing supermassive black hole formed billions of years ago masquerading as another using a survey known as the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S), the deepest X-ray image ever taken (above).

The CDF-S contains the highest concentration of black holes ever seen, equivalent to 5,000 over the area on the sky covered by the full Moon. The true identity of these black holes the ultimate extreme of a moment in timehelps solve a long-running mystery in astrophysics.

Supermassive black holes grow by pulling in surrounding material, which is heated and produces radiation at a wide range of wavelengths including X-rays, including a phase, which happened billions of years ago, when a dense cocoon of dust and gas covers most black holes. These cocoons of material are the fuel source that enables the black hole to grow and generate radiation.

Hidden in Cocoons

Based on the current picture held by astronomers many black holes buried in heavily obscured cocoons should exist, but are notoriously difficult to find, reports the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Until now the observed number has fallen short of predictionseven in the deepest images like the CDF-S.

With our new identifications weve found a bunch of heavily obscured black holes that had previously been missed, said Lambrides who led the study. We like to say we found these giant black holes, but they were really there all along.

Unveiled Over 80 Days

The latest study combined over 80 days of Chandra observing time in the CDF-S with large amounts of data at different wavelengths from other observatories, including NASAs Hubble Space Telescope and NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope. The team looked at black holes located 5 billion light years or more away from Earth. At these distances, scientists had already found 67 heavily obscured, growing black holes with both X-ray and infrared data in the CDF-S. In this latest study, the authors identified another 28.

Gargantuan Filaments Incubators of Supermassive Black Holes in Early Cosmos

These 28 supermassive black holes were previously categorized differentlyeither as slowly growing black holes with low density or nonexistent cocoons, or as distant galaxies.

A Case of Mistaken Identity

This could be considered a case of mistaken black hole identity, said co-author Marco Chiaberge of Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, but these black holes are exceptionally good at hiding exactly what they are.

Lambrides and her colleagues compared their data with expectations for a typical growing black hole. Using data from all of the wavelengths except for X-rays, they predicted the amount of X-rays they should be detecting from each black hole. The researchers found a much lower level of X-rays than they expected from 28 sources, which implies that the cocoon around them is about ten times denser than scientists previously estimated for these objects.

Supermassive Black Holes Could Actually Be Enigmatic Dark-Energy Objects

Taking the higher density of the cocoon into consideration, the team showed that the misidentified black holes are producing more X-rays than previously thought, but the denser cocoon prevents most of these X-rays from escaping and reaching the Chandra telescope. This implies they are growing more quickly.

Previous groups did not apply the analysis technique adopted by Lambrides and her team, nor did they use the full set of data available for the CDF-S, giving them little information about the density of the cocoons.

A Uniform Glow

These results are important for theoretical models estimating the number of black holes in the universe and their growth rates, including those with different amounts of obscuration (in other words, how dense their cocoons are). Scientists design these models to explain a uniform glow in X-rays across the sky called the X-ray background, first discovered in the 1960s. Individual growing black holes observed in images like the CDF-S account for most of the X-ray background.

The X-ray background not currently resolved into individual sources is dominated by X-rays with energies above the threshold that Chandra can detect. Heavily obscured black holes are a natural explanation for this unresolved component because lower-energy X-rays are absorbed by the cocoon more than high-energy ones, and therefore are less detectable. The additional heavily obscured black holes reported here help reconcile past differences between the theoretical models and observations.

Slowly Coming into Focus

Its like the X-ray background is a blurry picture that has been slowly coming into focus for decades, said co-author Roberto Gilli from the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF) in Bologna, Italy. Our work has involved understanding the nature of the objects that have been some of the last to be resolved.

In addition to helping explain the X-ray background, these results are important for understanding the evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. The masses of galaxies and their supermassive black holes are correlated with each other, meaning that the more massive the galaxy the more massive the black hole.

A paper reporting the results of this study is being published in The Astrophysical Journal. The other authors of the paper are Timothy Heckman of JHU; Fabio Vito from Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile, in Santiago, Chile; and Colin Norman from JHU.

Source: A Large Population of Obscured AGN in Disguise as Low Luminosity AGN in Chandra Deep Field South, arxiv.org/abs/2002.00955

The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via Chandra X-Ray Center

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Buried Monsters of the Early Universe Unveiled By the Deepest X-Ray Image Ever Taken - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

As dying stars take their final few breaths of life, they gently sprinkle their ashes into the cosmos through the magnificent planetary nebulae. These ashes, spread via stellar winds, are enriched with many different chemical elements, including carbon.

Findings from a study published on July 6, 2020, in Nature Astronomy show that the final breaths of these dying stars, called white dwarfs, shed light on carbons origin in the Milky Way.

The findings pose new, stringent constraints on how and when carbon was produced by stars of our galaxy, ending up within the raw material from which the Sun and its planetary system were formed 4.6 billion years ago, says Jeffrey Cummings, an Associate Research Scientist in the Johns Hopkins Universitys Department of Physics & Astronomy and an author on the paper.

NGC 7789, also known as Carolines Rose, is an old open star cluster of the Milky Way, which lies about 8,000 light-years away toward the constellation Cassiopeia. It hosts a few White Dwarfs of unusually high mass, analyzed in this study. Credit: Guillaume Seigneuret and NASA

The origin of carbon, an element essential to life on Earth, in the Milky Way galaxy is still debated among astrophysicists: some are in favor of low-mass stars that blew off their carbon-rich envelopes by stellar winds became white dwarfs, and others place the major site of carbons synthesis in the winds of massive stars that eventually exploded as supernovae.

Using data from the Keck Observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii collected between August and September 2018, the researchers analyzed white dwarfs belonging to the Milky Ways open star clusters. Open star clusters are groups of up to a few thousand stars held together by mutual gravitational attraction.

From this analysis, the research team measured the white dwarfs masses, and using the theory of stellar evolution, also calculated their masses at birth.

The connection between the birth masses to the final white dwarf masses is called the initial-final mass relation, a fundamental diagnostic in astrophysics that contains the entire life cycles of stars. Previous research always found an increasing linear relationship: the more massive the star at birth, the more massive the white dwarf left at its death.

But when Cummings and his colleagues calculated the initial-final mass relation, they were shocked to find that the white dwarfs from this group of open clusters had larger masses than astrophysicists previously believed. This discovery, they realized, broke the linear trend other studies always found. In other words, stars born roughly 1 billion years ago in the Milky Way didnt produce white dwarfs of about 0.60-0.65 solar masses, as it was commonly thought, but they died leaving behind more massive remnants of about 0.7 0.75 solar masses.

The researchers say that this kink in the trend explains how carbon from low-mass stars made its way into the Milky Way. In the last phases of their lives, stars twice as massive as the Milky Ways Sun produced new carbon atoms in their hot interiors, transported them to the surface and finally spread them into the surrounding interstellar environment through gentle stellar winds. The research teams stellar models indicate that the stripping of the carbon-rich outer mantle occurred slowly enough to allow the central cores of these stars, the future white dwarfs, to grow considerably in mass.

The team calculated that stars had to be at least 1.5 solar masses to spread its carbon-rich ashes upon death.

The findings, according to Paola Marigo, a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Padova and the studys first author, helps scientists understand the properties of galaxies in the universe. By combining the theories of cosmology and stellar evolution, the researchers expect that bright carbon-rich stars close to their death, like the progenitors of the white dwarfs analyzed in this study, are presently contributing to the light emitted by very distant galaxies. This light, which carries the signature of newly produced carbon, is routinely collected by the large telescopes from space and Earth to probe the evolution of cosmic structures. Therefore, this new understanding of how carbon is synthesized in stars also means having a more reliable interpreter of the light from the far universe.

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Reference: Carbon star formation as seen through the non-monotonic initialfinal mass relation by Paola Marigo, Jeffrey D. Cummings, Jason Lee Curtis, Jason Kalirai, Yang Chen, Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, Pierre Bergeron, Sara Bladh, Alessandro Bressan, Lo Girardi, Giada Pastorelli, Michele Trabucchi, Sihao Cheng, Bernhard Aringer and Piero Dal Tio, 6 July 2020, Nature Astronomy.DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1132-1

This study was funded by the European Research Council Consolidator Grant (project STARKEY, 615604) and the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (677706-WD3D).

Other authors on this study include Jason Kalirai and Sihao Cheng of the Johns Hopkins University; Jason Lee Curtis of the American Museum of Natural History; Yang Chen and Bernhard Aringer of the University of Padova; Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay of the University of Warwick; Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz of the University of California, Santa Cruz; Pierre Bergeron of the Universit de Montral; Sara Bladh of Uppsala University; Alessandro Bressan of the International School for Advanced Studies; Lo Girardi of the Astronomical Observatory of Padova-INAF; Giada Pastorelli of the Space Telescope Science Institute; and Michele Trabucchi and Piero Dal Tio of the University of Geneva.

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Dying Stars and Stellar Winds Breathe Life Into Earth - SciTechDaily

KARACHI: Five planets of the solar system would be visible together at 12am tonight in the city sky, a topplanetary scientist announced on Sunday.

The five planets that can be viewed simultaneously tonight include Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, according to Prof Dr Muhammad Jawed Iqbal, the director at the Institute of Space and Planetary Astrophysics (ISPA) a research facility at the University of Karachi.

"It will be possible to see the five planets together at midnight and all five can be seen without binoculars," Dr Iqbal said. "Usually, two to three planets are visible in the night sky."

The scientist noted that the coming together of the planets would be available for viewing for the next few nights. However, it would be difficult to see the interesting activity in the sky due to Karachi's current cloudy weather.

It is interesting to note that at the same time, Mercury will be in retrograde (apparent motion of moving backwards) for the second time this year, from June 18 to July 12, 2020, according to Forbes. Furthermore, the ringed Saturn would bebrightest at night on July 20, the publication added, as it would reach opposition.

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Spectacular sight of five planets together to be seen in Karachi at midnight - Geo News

Solar Orbiter spots campfires on the Sun. Locations of campfires are annotated with white arrows.

NASA and ESA have released the first images of the Solar Orbiter, including the closest pictures ever taken of the Sun. These images were captured when the spacecraft completed its first close pass of the Sun in mid-June this year.

These unprecedented pictures of the Sun are the closest we have ever obtained, said Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist for the mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

He further added: These amazing images will help scientists piece together the Suns atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system.

Launched on February 10, 2020, the Solar Orbiter mission has carried several cutting-edge instruments to monitor the environment of the Earths closest star. Aboard the Orbiter are six remote-sensing instruments, or telescopes, to snap images of the Sun and its surroundings, along with four other in-situ instruments.

Through this mission, scientists aim to gain an in-depth understanding of the solar wind, and how it releases the stream of charged particles that influence the entire Solar System.

The first images from the mission detail the presence of millions of miniature-size solar flaresalso referred to as 'campfires'near the surface of the Sun. NASA describes solar flares as sudden explosions of energy caused by the tangling, crossing, or reorganising of magnetic field lines near sunspots.

The images were captured by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) on May 30, 2020, from a distance of 77 million km from the Sun. During this time, the Solar Orbiter was at the periheliona point in its elliptical orbit measured to be closest to the Sunwhich is roughly half the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

The EUI is programmed to take high-resolution images of the solar coronathe outermost layer of the Suns atmospherewhich usually remains unexposed due to the bright light of the Suns surface and is, therefore, difficult to capture.

The campfires are little relatives of the solar flares that we can observe from Earth, million or billion times smaller, said David Berghmans of the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB), Principal Investigator of the EUI instrument in an official statement. The Sun might look quiet at first glance, but when we look in detail, we can see those miniature flares everywhere we look, he added.

Meanwhile, space scientists are still trying to understand if these campfires are just smaller versions of solar flares or a different phenomenon altogether.

Scientists have, however, hypothesised that these campfires may be the reason behind coronal heating. The corona layer is the part of Suns upper atmosphere, which burns at temperature worth millions of degrees. This layer also extends to millions of kilometres into the outer space.

With the help of more Orbiter data, scientists are aiming to demystify the mysterious coronal heating phenomenon and figure out what causes the corona to be so hota problem considered to be among the most vexing in astrophysics.

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Solar Orbiter Captures Closest Images of the Sun; Reveals Presence of Millions of 'Campfires' - The Weather Channel

The age of the universe is around 13.8 billion years, an international team of astrophysicists has said in a study published Wednesday.

From a mountain high in Chiles Atacama Desert, astronomers with the National Science Foundations Atacama Cosmology Telescope have taken a fresh look at the oldest light in the universe. Their new observations, plus a bit of cosmic geometry, suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old, give or take 40 million years.

The new estimate matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe and measurements of the same light made by the Planck satellite, a space-based observatory that ran from 2009-2013.

This adds a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community, said Simone Aiola, first author of one of two new papers on the findings posted July 15 to arXiv.org. The trouble is that research teams measuring the movements of galaxies have calculated that the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That discrepancy suggested that a new model for the universe might be needed, and sparked concerns that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect.

Now weve come up with an answer where Planck and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope agree, said Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institutes Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.

The age of the universe also reveals how fast the cosmos is expanding, a number called the Hubble constant. The Atacama measurements suggest a Hubble constant of 67.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec. This result agrees almost exactly with the previous estimate of 67.4 by the Planck satellite team, but its slower than the 74 inferred from the measurements of galaxies.

Making this independent measurement is really exciting because theres a mystery in the field, and this helps us sharpen our understanding of that mystery, said Jeff McMahon, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago who led the design of the detectors and other new technologies used to make this measurement. This confirms the ongoing discrepancy. And we still have much more data to analyze, so this is just the beginning.

The close agreement between the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and Planck results and the standard cosmological model is bittersweet, Aiola said: Its good to know that our model right now is robust, but it would have been nice to see a hint of something new. Still, the disagreement with the 2019 study of the motions of galaxies maintains the possibility that unknown physics may be at play, he said.

Like the Planck satellite and its earthbound cousin the South Pole Telescope, the Atacama Telescope peers at the afterglow of the Big Bang. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, marks a time 380,000 years after the universes birth, when protons and electrons joined to form the first atoms. Before that time, the cosmos was opaque to light.

If scientists can estimate how far light from the CMB traveled to reach Earth, they can calculate the universes age. Thats easier said than done, though. Judging cosmic distances from Earth is hard. So instead, scientists measure the angle in the sky between two distant objects, with Earth and the two objects forming a cosmic triangle. If scientists also know the physical separation between those objects, they can use high school geometry to estimate the distance of the objects from Earth.

Subtle variations in the CMBs glow offer anchor points to form the other two vertices of the triangle. Those variations in temperature and polarization resulted from quantum fluctuations in the early universe that got amplified by the expanding universe into regions of varying density. (The denser patches would go on to form galaxy clusters.) Scientists have a strong enough understanding of the universes early years to know that these variations in the CMB should typically be spaced out every billion light-years for temperature and half that for polarization. (For scale, our Milky Way galaxy is about 200,000 light-years in diameter.)

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope measured the CMB fluctuations with unprecedented resolution and sky coverage, taking a closer look at the polarization of the light. The Planck satellite measured the same light, but by measuring its polarization in higher fidelity, the new picture from Atacama reveals more of the oldest patterns weve ever seen, said Suzanne Staggs, the telescopes principal investigator and the Henry deWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University.

This measurement was possible thanks to new technology designed and built by McMahons team. Basically, we figured out how to make the detectors measure two colors and to pack as many into each camera as possible, McMahon said. Then we developed new lenses out of metamaterials. (Metamaterials are a type of material thats engineered to produce properties that dont exist naturally.)

From conception to deployment at the telescope to analysis, the process has spanned nearly 10 years, McMahon said. Working with this amazing team to develop this project all the way from concept sketches to producing results at the forefront of cosmology, has been absolutely fantastic.

Sara Simon, now at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, made significant contributions to detector design; UChicago graduate student Joey Golec developed methods to fabricate the metamaterial optics; and UChicago graduate student Maya Mallaby-Kay is now working to make the datasets public.

As the Atacama Cosmology Telescope continues making observations, astronomers will have an even clearer picture of the CMB and a more exact idea of how long ago the cosmos began. The team will also scour those observations for signs of physics that doesnt fit the standard cosmological model. Such strange physics could resolve the disagreement between the predictions of the age and expansion rate of the universe arising from the measurements of the CMB and the motions of galaxies.

Were continuing to observe half the sky from Chile with our telescope, said Mark Devlin, the telescopes deputy director and the Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. As the precision of both techniques increases, the pressure to resolve the conflict will only grow.

I didnt have a particular preference for any specific value it was going to be interesting one way or another, said Cornell Universitys Steve Choi, first author of the other paper posted to arXiv.org. We find an expansion rate that is right on the estimate by the Planck satellite team. This gives us more confidence in measurements of the universes oldest light.

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New study of oldest light confirms age of the universe Tunis Daily News - Tdnews

If it is Comet Neowise that enthuses Padmasree, an engineering student from Thiruvananthapuram, Keerthana Vengatesan, an undergraduate student in mathematics from Attur, is fascinated by the length of a lightning bolt. Neha P, a physics graduate from Bengaluru, is obsessed with black holes, whereas Indhirakumar Balakrishnan, a biotechnologist from Namakkal, has gone deep into the food habits of tribesmen in the Kalahari desert.

They are among 100-plus science enthusiasts who form the backbone of the portal shasthrasnehi.com. The pandemic-induced lockdown has seen the formation of several online communities and this science portal is among them. Within two months or so, the forum has emerged as a growing community of science buffs spread across India.

A group of us had attended a course on astrophysics and cosmology conducted by Amateur Astronomers Organisation (AASTRO) in Thiruvananthapuram in 2018. We kept in touch and used to hold discussions and interactions that eventually resulted in the launch of a science blog in Malayalam. We shifted to English to make it accessible to non-Malayali friends. During the lockdown we shared articles among our network of friends and that did wonders. The write-ups were widely read and when more people joined the group we launched the website in May, says Arun S, a physics graduate and co-founder of the forum.

Among those who contribute articles on the page are school and college students, graduates and postgraduates, engineers, researchers, lecturers, scientists and technology experts. Anand Narayanan, associate professor, Department of Earth and Space Science, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, is the resource person. Co-founders of the page are Abhijith Prakash Mangattu, currently working with the Ministry of Education in the UAE and Sreebala PS, final year undergraduate student in Physics at St Johns College, Kollam.

Our motto is Science for Society. So we convey scientific information in simple language and try to avoid all jargon. Whenever our members come across a scientific fact or development in a journal or any platform, they write on that topic in a way that can be understood by all, says Arun. The articles, vetted by the editorial board, fall under categories such as technology, general science, space science, earth science, chemistry, mathematics and puzzles and life sciences. The team maintains the website and designs images for the articles. Writers themselves can choose the topic and are expected to give at least one article per month.

The team adds that the forum has been appreciated by scientists and experts from other countries. Arun cites an article by Suad Kadeem Khan on ancient crocodiles that walked like dinosaurs. Suad, pursuing BSc Biotechnology in UAE, had based her piece on the findings of Anthony Romilio, a palaeontologist and research associate at The University of Queensland. When we contacted the University to give us permission to use the images, they wanted to know the reason for our request. Once we explained the mission of the forum, Dr Anthony himself mailed us and allowed us to use the images. They have extended their support for our website, says Arun.

While the one-minute read section is popular, many follow the science calendar as well. The latter gives information about important scientific events scheduled every month. For example, programmes like the space walk and launch of NASAs Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, which can be watched live on the page of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), have a keen following. Lecture series have also been a hit, especially the one on astrophotography by Abhijith. Shastrasnehi, meaning science lover, has also started Childrens blog for school students to post their articles.

Audio interviews with eminent scientists/researchers and a YouTube channel are in the pipeline. The team plans to reach out to children in tribal areas as well. We will soon launch Sisterblogs, where members can write in their own regional language. Looking ahead, we hope to reach 1,000 members in a couple of years, including enthusiasts from across the world. We also want to highlight scientific research in India and throw light on achievements of scientists in the country, Arun says.

To become a member, contact shasthrasnehi@gmail.com or 97465 20118 (WhatsApp).

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A website by science enthusiasts gains traction during the lockdown - The Hindu

From a mountain high in Chile's Atacama Desert, astronomers with the National Science Foundation's Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) have taken a fresh look at the oldest light in the universe. Their new observations plus a bit of cosmic geometry suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old, give or take 40 million years.

The new estimate matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe and measurements of the same light made by the Planck satellite. This adds a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community, said Simone Aiola, first author of one of two new papers on the findings posted to arXiv.org. In 2019, a research team measuring the movements of galaxies calculated that the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That discrepancy suggested that a new model for the universe might be needed and sparked concerns that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect.

"Now we've come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree. It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable," said Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. The age of the universe also reveals how fast the cosmos is expanding, a number quantified by the Hubble constant. The ACT measurements suggest a Hubble constant of 67.6 kilometres per second per megaparsec. That means an object 1 megaparsec (around 3.26 million light-years) from Earth is moving away from us at 67.6 kilometres per second due to the expansion of the universe.

This result agrees almost exactly with the previous estimate of 67.4 kilometres per second per megaparsec by the Planck satellite team, but it's slower than the 74 kilometres per second per megaparsec inferred from the measurements of galaxies. "I didn't have a particular preference for any specific value -- it was going to be interesting one way or another," said Steve Choi of Cornell University, first author of the other paper posted to arXiv.org.

"We find an expansion rate that is right on the estimate by the Planck satellite team. This gives us more confidence in measurements of the universe's oldest light," added Choi. The close agreement between the ACT and Planck results and the standard cosmological model is bittersweet, Aiola said.

"It's good to know that our model right now is robust, but it would have been nice to see a hint of something new," he said. The disagreement with the 2019 study of the motions of galaxies maintains the possibility that unknown physics may be at play, he says.

Like the Planck satellite, ACT peers at the afterglow of the Big Bang. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), marks a time 380,000 years after the universe's birth when protons and electrons joined to form the first atoms. Before that time, the cosmos was opaque to light. If scientists can estimate how far light from the CMB travelled to reach Earth, they can calculate the universe's age. That's easier said than done, though. Judging cosmic distances from Earth is hard.

So instead, scientists measure the angle in the sky between two distant objects, with Earth and the two objects forming a cosmic triangle. If scientists also know the physical separation between those objects, they can use high school geometry to estimate the distance of the objects from Earth. Subtle variations in the CMB's glow offer anchor points to form the other two vertices of the triangle. Those variations in temperature and polarization resulted from quantum fluctuations in the early universe that got amplified by the expanding universe into regions of varying density. (The denser patches would go on to form galaxy clusters.)

Scientists have a strong enough understanding of the universe's early years to know that these variations in the CMB should typically be spaced out every billion light-years for temperature and half that for polarization. (For scale, our Milky Way galaxy is about 200,000 light-years in diameter.) ACT measured the CMB fluctuations with unprecedented resolution, taking a closer look at the polarization of the light.

"The Planck satellite measured the same light, but by measuring its polarization in higher fidelity, the new picture from ACT reveals more of the oldest patterns we've ever seen," said Suzanne Staggs, ACT's principal investigator and the Henry deWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University. As ACT continues making observations, astronomers will have an even clearer picture of the CMB and a more exact idea of how long ago the cosmos began. The ACT team will also scour those observations for signs of physics that doesn't fit the standard cosmological model.

Such strange physics could resolve the disagreement between the predictions of the age and expansion rate of the universe arising from the measurements of the CMB and the motions of galaxies. "We are continuing to observe half the sky from Chile with our telescope. As the precision of both techniques increases, the pressure to resolve the conflict will only grow," said Mark Devlin, ACT's deputy director and the Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. (ANI)

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New view of oldest light adds a twist to debate over the Universe's Age - Devdiscourse

The closest images ever captured of the Sun show what scientists are calling campfires on the stars surface.

These first images from the Solar Orbiter mission were released to the public today, July 16. They were captured in mid-June when the spacecraft was roughly halfway between Earth and the Sun, NASA said in a news release. The campfires seen in the images could be nanoflares, but more data is needed to know for sure.

The mission, which launched on Feb. 9, is an international collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to study Earths closest star.

These amazing images will help scientists piece together the Suns atmospheric layers, which is important for understanding how it drives space weather near the Earth and throughout the solar system, said Holly Gilbert, NASA project scientist.

The early images indicate that the mission is off to an excellent start, said Daniel Mller, ESAs Solar Orbiter project scientist.

The spacecraft made its first close solar pass on June 15. As it flew within 48 million miles of the Sun, all 10 instruments flicked on, and Solar Orbiter snapped the closest pictures of the star to date. (Other spacecraft have been closer, but none have carried Sun-facing imagers.)

The spacecraft has six imaging instruments that each study a different aspect of the Sun. Normally, the first images from a mission confirm the instruments are working; scientists dont expect new discoveries from them, according to NASA. In this case, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager, or EUI, returned data hinting at solar features never observed before.

Scientists are pointing out what they call campfires dotting the Suns surface in the EUI images.

The closest images ever captured of the Sun show what scientists are calling campfires on the stars surface. The Solar Orbiter is a joint mission by NASA and the European Space Agency to study the Sun.NASA/European Space Agency

The campfires we are talking about here are the little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller, said principal investigator David Berghmans, an astrophysicist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. When looking at the new high resolution EUI images, they are literally everywhere we look.

Its not yet clear what these campfires are but they could be mini-explosions known as nanoflares tiny but ubiquitous sparks theorized to help heat the Suns outer atmosphere, known as the corona, to a temperature 300 times hotter than the solar surface.

To know for sure, scientists need measurements of the campfires' temperature. Fortunately, there is an instrument on Solar Orbiter to do that: The Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment, or SPICE instrument.

Were eagerly awaiting our next data set, said Frdric Auchre, principal investigator for SPICE operations at the Institute for Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France. The hope is to detect nanoflares for sure and to quantify their role in coronal heating.

The images seen in the animation at the top of the article consist of a series of views captured with several remote-sensing instruments on Solar Orbiter between May 30-June 21, when the spacecraft was roughly halfway between the Earth and the Sun closer to the Sun than any other solar telescope has ever been before.

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Closest images of the Sun to date show campfires on surface - MLive.com

Scientists know that planets form from disks of dust and gas that swirl around young stars, when clumps gradually form and gravity creates planets over millions of years. But they want to learn more about this process, so they need to find more of these protoplanetary disks for observations.

A new project from NASA aims to get the publics help with this, by inviting them to help identify disks through a website called Disk Detective.

Were trying to understand how long it takes for planets to form, astrophysicist Marc Kuchner, the Disk Detective project lead at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center and the Citizen Science Officer for NASAs Science Mission Directorate, explained in a statement. Tracing the evolution of these disks is the main way that we know how long planet formation takes.

This illustration shows a young, sun-like star encircled by its planet-forming disk of gas and dust. NASA/JPL-Caltech

To help in this project, you can head to the Disk Detective page on the citizen science platform Zooniverse and select Get Started.The site will show you a tutorial on how to identify a planetary disk, then ask you to select from a list of options describing the objects shape which will help with classification.

The site has a massive dataset of 150,000 stars, so there are plenty of targets for volunteers to work through. Most of the stars in the dataset are M dwarfs, which are the most common stars in our galaxy, or brown dwarfs, which are cooler and less massive than other stars.

This system has the potential to bring real benefits to scientific research. We have multiple citizen scientists look at each object, give their own independent opinion, and trust the wisdom of the crowd to decide what things are probably galaxies and what things are probably stars with disks around them, said Disk Detectives director, Steven Silverberg, a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Other NASA citizen science projects include inviting the public to help navigate rovers around Mars, help pick a landing site on distant asteroid Bennu, and identify and map the worlds corals. The Disk Detective project has already assisted in some exciting discoveries such as the identification of the closest yet young brown dwarf disk to Earth.

To figure out how disks evolve, we need a big sample of different kinds of disks of different ages, Kuchner said. NASA needs your help. Come discover these disks with us!

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NASA wants your help identifying the birthplaces of planets - Yahoo! Voices

Putting an astrophysicist in the company of medievalists, literature scholars and historians may not seem like a natural fit, but its a perfect match as far as David Sylvester is concerned.

The University of St. Michaels president and vice chancellor figures he has the best person to make the combination work Fr. Adam Hincks, a Jesuit and cosmologist whose study of the universe included working at the Vatican Observatory.

He is the inaugural holder of the Sutton Family Chair in Science, Christianity and Cultures at St. Michaels at the University of Toronto. The Sutton Chair places Hincks as a working scientist in the middle of the St. Mikes Christianity and Culture program, talking with undergraduates about science, culture and religion all at once.

Its all about the spaces between disciplines, said Sylvester.

When you get a guy like Adam Hincks who is incredibly gifted, who is not only promising but is early-established in his career as a very good cosmologist, but who also has theological formation think of the gifts that individual brings to my campus, Sylvester said. Here you have a person who embodies that wholistic understanding of why we exist or the search for it. He doesnt have the answers, but hes searching. Do you know what a gift that is for my students?

The 38-year-old Hincks is a 2004 graduate of St. Michaels who won the St. Michaels College Gold Medal for the highest cumulative GPA (grade point average) in sciences. He went on to Princeton, earning a PhD in 2009 before entering the Jesuits. He studied philosophy at Torontos Regis College and did a Bachelor of Sacred Theology at Romes Pontifical Gregorian University. While in Rome he was one of the scientists at the Vatican Observatory. He also did postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia.

Hincks, who sees the job as a unique opportunity, is anxious to learn from the students and faculty he will meet at St. Michaels.

I think its great that Im in a program that has medievalists; that has, for example, Stephen Tardif. Hes a Gerard Manley Hopkins expert. As a Jesuit, it will be great to be able to pick his brain about that, just out of personal interest, Hincks said.

Hincks also looks forward to the working with historian of science Jean-Olivier Richard.

In teaching some of these courses, I think we would complement each other quite well, he said. He knows the history of science. He knows the source texts. What I bring is an expertise in whats going on now in cosmology, in astrophysics.

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St. Mike's reaches for the stars to fill Sutton Family Chair - The Catholic Register

An important breakthrough in how we can understand dead star collisions and the expansion of the Universe has been made by an international team, led by the University of East Anglia. They have discovered an unusual pulsar one of deep spaces magnetized spinning neutron-star lighthouses that emits highly focused radio waves from its magnetic poles. The newly discovered pulsar (known as PSR J1913+1102) is part of a binary system which means that it is locked in a fiercely tight orbit with another neutron star. Neutron stars are the dead stellar remnants of a supernova. They are made up of the most dense matter known packing hundreds of thousands of times the Earths mass into a sphere the size of a city. In around half a billion years the two neutron stars will collide, releasing astonishing amounts of energy in the form of gravitational waves and light. But the newly discovered pulsar is unusual because the masses of its two neutron stars are quite different with one far larger than the other. This asymmetric system gives scientists confidence that double neutron star mergers will provide vital clues about unsolved mysteries in astrophysics including a more accurate determination of the expansion rate of the Universe, known as the Hubble constant. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, was made using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. Credit: Courtesy of Arecibo Observatory/University of Central Florida William Gonzalez and Andy Torres.

An important breakthrough in how we can understand dead star collisions and the expansion of the Universe has been made by an international team, led by the University of East Anglia.

They have discovered an unusual pulsar one of deep spaces magnetized spinning neutron-star lighthouses that emits highly focused radio waves from its magnetic poles.

The newly discovered pulsar (known as PSR J1913+1102) is part of a binary system which means that it is locked in a fiercely tight orbit with another neutron star.

The event caused gravitational-wave ripples through the fabric of space time, as predicted by Albert Einstein over a century ago.

Neutron stars are the dead stellar remnants of a supernova. They are made up of the most dense matter known packing hundreds of thousands of times the Earths mass into a sphere the size of a city.

In around half a billion years the two neutron stars will collide, releasing astonishing amounts of energy in the form of gravitational waves and light.

But the newly discovered pulsar is unusual because the masses of its two neutron stars are quite different with one far larger than the other.

This asymmetric system gives scientists confidence that double neutron star mergers will provide vital clues about unsolved mysteries in astrophysics including a more accurate determination of the expansion rate of the Universe, known as the Hubble constant.

The discovery, published today (July 8, 2020) in the journal Nature, was made using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

Lead researcher Dr. Robert Ferdman, from UEAs School of Physics, said: Back in 2017, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) first detected the merger of two neutron stars. The event caused gravitational-wave ripples through the fabric of space time, as predicted by Albert Einstein over a century ago.

Known as GW170817, this spectacular event was also seen with traditional telescopes at observatories around the world, which identified its location in a distant galaxy, 130 million light years from our own Milky Way.

Dr. Ferdman said: It confirmed that the phenomenon of short gamma-ray bursts was due to the merger of two neutron stars. And these are now thought to be the factories that produce most of the heaviest elements in the Universe, such as gold.

The power released during the fraction of a second when two neutron stars merge is enormous estimated to be tens of times larger than all stars in the Universe combined.

This matter is still a major mystery its so dense that scientists still dont know what it is actually made of. These densities are far beyond what we can reproduce in Earth-based laboratories.

So the GW170817 event was not surprising. But the enormous amount of matter ejected from the merger and its brightness was an unexpected mystery.

Dr. Ferdman said: Most theories about this event assumed that neutron stars locked in binary systems are very similar in mass.

Our new discovery changes these assumptions. We have uncovered a binary system containing two neutron stars with very different masses.

These stars will collide and merge in around 470 million years, which seems like a long time, but it is only a small fraction of the age of the Universe.

Because one neutron star is significantly larger, its gravitational influence will distort the shape of its companion star stripping away large amounts of matter just before they actually merge, and potentially disrupting it altogether.

This tidal disruption ejects a larger amount of hot material than expected for equal-mass binary systems, resulting in a more powerful emission.

Although GW170817 can be explained by other theories, we can confirm that a parent system of neutron stars with significantly different masses, similar to the PSR J1913+1102 system, is a very plausible explanation.

Perhaps more importantly, the discovery highlights that there are many more of these systems out there making up more than one in 10 merging double neutron star binaries.

Co-author Dr. Paulo Freire from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, said: Such a disruption would allow astrophysicists to gain important new clues about the exotic matter that makes up the interiors of these extreme, dense objects.

This matter is still a major mystery its so dense that scientists still dont know what it is actually made of. These densities are far beyond what we can reproduce in Earth-based laboratories.

The disruption of the lighter neutron star would also enhance the brightness of the material ejected by the merger. This means that along with gravitational-wave detectors such as the US-based LIGO and the Europe-based Virgo detector, scientists will also be able to observe them with conventional telescopes.

Dr. Ferdman said: Excitingly, this may also allow for a completely independent measurement of the Hubble constant the rate at which the Universe is expanding. The two main methods for doing this are currently at odds with each other, so this is a crucial way to break the deadlock and understand in more detail how the Universe evolved.

###

Reference: Asymmetric mass ratios for bright double neutron-star mergers by R. D. Ferdman, P. C. C. Freire, B. B. P. Perera, N. Pol, F. Camilo, S. Chatterjee, J. M. Cordes, F. Crawford, J. W. T. Hessels, V. M. Kaspi, M. A. McLaughlin, E. Parent, I. H. Stairs and J. van Leeuwen, 8 July 2020, Nature.DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2439-x

The research was led by UEA in collaboration with scientists at Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, Columbia University, Cornell University, Franklin and Marshall College, the University of Amsterdam, McGill University, West Virginia University, the University of British Columbia, the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON).

Asymmetric mass ratios for bright double neutron-star mergers is published in the journalNatureon July 8, 2020.

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Vital Clues to Unsolved Mysteries in Astrophysics Including Expansion of the Universe From Colliding Neutron Stars - SciTechDaily

The afterglow of an explosion billions of light-years away has provided astronomers with a window into what the "teenage" years of our universe may have looked like, according to a new study.

Astronomers detected the afterglow of a short gamma ray burst 10 billion light-years away. This is considered a rare event because afterglows of these short bursts are both fast and faint and can disappear hours later.

They have named the burst SGRB181123B, which occurred about 3.8 billion years after the Big Bang. It's the second most-distant short gamma ray burst, known as an SGRB, ever detected and the most distant to have a visible afterglow.

"This SGRB essentially allows us to explore 'terra incognita,' " said Wen-fai Fong, senior study author and assistant professor of physics and astronomy in Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, in an email.

"They are extremely hard to find (because they are so distant, they are also fainter which makes them even more difficult to catch) and therefore we do not know the true rates of SGRBs during this period of the universe," Fong said.

"SGRBs originate from the mergers of two neutron stars, and it is of great interest to understand when neutron star mergers happen in our universe, and how long they take to merge," she said.

Short gamma ray bursts are incredibly energetic and bright, occurring when the dense remains of exploded stars, called neutron stars, collide. The merging of the two neutron stars releases short bursts of gamma rays, which are the most energetic form of light.

On average, astronomers can hope to detect fewer than than 10 short gamma ray bursts in a year that are close enough for them to conduct follow-up observations using telescopes. But their afterglows fade away after a few hours, meaning that it's rare for astronomers to actually observe them in any detail.

"We believe we are uncovering the tip of the iceberg in terms of distant SGRBs," said Kerry Paterson, lead study author and postdoctoral associate in Northwestern's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics, in a statement. "That motivates us to further study past events and intensely examine future ones."

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected the event on Thanksgiving inight n November 2018. A group of astronomers at Northwestern University was able to gain remote access of the Gemini Observatory's Gemini-North telescope and measure the afterglow of the burst only hours later. The telescope is located on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

The quest for these bursts is a labor of love that requires teamwork.

Fong was asleep after a Thanksgiving dinner with her family in New York, but Paterson was observing using the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Together, they were able to point both Keck and remotely initiate observations through Gemini-North the evening the burst was detected.

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"I love gamma-ray bursts because they evolve on human timescales," Fong said. "From the time you eat lunch to the time you eat dinner on the same day, the GRB afterglow has been evolving, fading in brightness on minute/hour timescales.

"Once they're detected, you really want to capture every moment that you can with them!" she said. "The human element of this particular burst was unreal to me and a great example of teamwork. If you had to do it all on your own, you would never sleep."

"We were able to obtain deep observations of the burst mere hours after its discovery," Paterson said. "The Gemini images were very sharp, allowing us to pinpoint the location to a specific galaxy in the universe."

Follow-up observations were conducted using the Gemini-South telescope in Chile, the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the MMT Observatory in Arizona. The Gemini-South telescope has a near-infrared spectrography which allows it measure in more red wavelengths and to peer into the distant universe.

That's when the researchers discovered the great distance of the burst's host galaxy and realized they had detected a very distant short gamma ray burst's afterglow.

"It is not easy to ask a large telescope to move quickly," Fong said. "But in the game of GRBs, you will never know what you missed until you react quickly, point the telescopes and take images. This SGRB shows that it was definitely worth pointing!"

This particular burst occurred when the universe was 30% of its current age, which is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old. This adolescent time period of the universe is also referred to the researchers as "cosmic high noon."

"The farther out into the universe you go, the farther back in time you are looking," Fong said.

By studying the afterglow of the burst, they could understand what neutron star mergers were like in the young universe. This was the peak of star formation in the history of the universe. Today, it's "rather quiet," Fong said.

At the time of this burst, there was a lot of activity occurring in the universe, including rapid star formation and the quick growth of galaxies. In order for this neutron star merger to occur, that means the pair of stars orbiting each other that created them -- or binary stars -- needed to grow to their massive size and evolve until they died.

"It's long been unknown how long neutron stars in particular those that produce SGRBs take to merge," Fong said. "Finding an SGRB at this point in the universe's history suggests that, at a time when the universe was forming lots of stars, the neutron star pair may have merged fairly rapidly."

Fong said that the fact that they can count the number of short GRBs at these distances on one hand after 16 years of Swift operations, reveals how difficult these detections truly are.

But the researchers are motivated to continue their search for these bursts since they don't know when they'll discover something like this, Fong said.

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Astronomers witness 'teenage' years of our universe in explosion - Gwinnettdailypost.com

Residents across New England have a chance this month to spot an incredibly bright comet as it passes by Earth the last time it will be visible from the planet for 6,800 years, astronomers said.

The comet, named NEOWISE after the mission that discovered it, is one of only a few comets that will be able to be seen with the naked eye this century, according to a statement from NASA.

NASAs Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer first detected the comet on March 27, NASA said. Since then, people across the globe have repeatedly seen NEOWISE soar across the sky.

Federica Spoto, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said comets that can be seen with just the human eye or with a pair of binoculars, like NEOWISE, are rare. Astronomers havent observed a comet this bright since 1997, when Comet Hale-Bopp passed by Earth, Spoto said.

Im excited because this will be my once-in-a-lifetime possibility of seeing this comet with my naked eye, Spoto said. I think thats great that we can witness its long voyage. And its amazing that I can see this from my backyard without the use of a telescope.

The comet is 64 million miles away from Earth and is roughly 4.6 billion years old, about the age of the solar system, according to NASA.

It looks like the comet nucleus is sooty and covered by dark particles left over from its formation, Spoto said. I love the fact that studying these objects is like going back in time, when everything formed from dust and particles.

The comet will be closest to Earth on July 22 as it heads toward the outer solar system. But its already visible from New England this week, Spoto said. NEOWISE is visible for about an hour before sunrise close to the horizon in the northeastern sky, and it can also be spotted after sunset in the northwestern horizon.

NEOWISE is viewed best away from city lights. But because this comet is so bright, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said residents in the city could get a glimpse of it, too.

You should be able to make it out from Boston, but itll look much bigger and more spectacular if you can see the fainter outer parts of the tail, and that needs dark skies out in the country, McDowell said.

While scientists discover dozens of comets each year, most are far away and hard to see, he said.

Its exciting that this is one that is easily visible, McDowell said. Thatll also make it easier for scientists to study for example, measuring the light from it to find out what its chemical composition is.

Caroline Enos can be reached at caroline.enos@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @CarolineEnos.

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Once-in-a-lifetime comet will be visible over New England this month, astronomers say - The Boston Globe

Members of the public can help scientists learn how planets form by sifting through data from NASA's WISE mission, managed by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Planets form from gas and dustparticles swirling around baby stars in enormous spinning disks. But because thisprocess takes millions of years, scientists can only learn about these disks byfinding and studying a lot of different examples.

Through a project called Disk Detective, you can help. Anyone, regardless of background or prior knowledge,can assist scientists in figuring out the mysteries of planet formation. Disk Detectiveis an example of citizen science, a collaboration between professionalscientists and members of the public.

"We're trying to understandhow long it takes for planets to form," said astrophysicist Marc Kuchner, theDisk Detective project lead at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,Maryland, and the Citizen Science Officer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate."Tracing the evolution of these disks is the main way that we know how longplanet formation takes."

Disk Detective has just relaunchedwith a new website and a new dataset of about 150,000 stars. This new version ofthe project focuses on M dwarfs, which represent the most common type of star inthe Milky Way galaxy. It also concentrates on brown dwarfs, which are balls of gasthat don't burn hydrogen the way stars do and often more closely resemble giantplanets like Jupiter.

After reading the instructions,participants can start identifying disks right away in Disk Detective. The interfacepresents a series of real astronomical images and asks visitors questions that willhelp determine more definitively if a disk is present. The images come from NASA'sWide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which now operates as NEOWISE, as well as theground-based Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) inHawaii and the NASA-funded Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), which operated from1997 to 2001.

"We have multiple citizenscientists look at each object, give their own independent opinion, and trust thewisdom of the crowd to decide what things are probably galaxies and what thingsare probably stars with disks around them," said Disk Detective's director,Steven Silverberg, a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology'sKavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Advanced users learn more aboutthe objects they're studying using professional data archives. Those who contributesubstantial insight receive credit on scientific papers describing the discoveriesmade through Disk Detective's efforts. Professional scientists then follow up oncitizen scientists' input using more sophisticated tools and new observations. Fifteencitizen scientists have already become named co-authors on peer-reviewed scientificpapers through Disk Detective.

One enthusiastic Disk Detective"superuser" is Hugo Durantini Luca, a computer technician in Crdoba,Argentina. He began classifying disks with the project in 2014 and since then hastaken on additional responsibilities: writing tutorials, moderating discussions,and even helping use telescopes in South America to follow up on interesting targets.While he became involved because of his interest in detecting planetary systemsand analyzing images, he says he highly values "the way you are able to workwith the science team directly." He is in frequent communication with Kuchnerand other professional astronomers, and he participates in a weekly video call forsuperusers.

"I think we are going tohave an interesting new season," Durantini Luca said. "The new way weare processing the data will allow us to analyze the image[s] with better detail."

Citizen scientists at Disk Detectivemade an important discovery in 2016: a new class of disks, called Peter Pan disks. Most disks around young, low-massstars should lose their gas, due to planet formation and natural dissipation intospace, after 5 million years. Yet Disk Detective citizen scientists discovered adisk with plenty of gas orbiting a star that is roughly 45 million years old.

Since then, seven similar mysteriouslyyoung-looking disks have been found, each at least 20 million years old. Scientistsare still puzzling out why planet formation goes on for so long in these disks.They predict that citizen scientists may find as many as 15 new Peter Pan disksthrough the newly revamped Disk Detective.

"To figure out how disksevolve, we need a big sample of different kinds of disks of different ages,"Kuchner said.

More recently, Disk Detective'sefforts resulted in a discovery announced on June 2 at the American AstronomicalSociety's (AAS) 236th meeting, which was held virtually. With the help of citizenscientists, astronomers identified the closest young brown dwarf disk yet, one thatmay have the capability to form planets. This 3.7-million-year-old brown dwarf,called W1200-7845, is about 333 light-years away. A light-year is the distance lighttravels in one year; the closest star beyond the Sun is over 4 light-years away.

"There are not many examplesof young brown dwarfs so close to the Sun, so W1200-7845 is an exciting discovery,"said Maria Schutte, a predoctoral graduate student at the University of Oklahoma,who led the study and presented the findings at the AAS meeting. Durantini Lucaand other citizen scientists were included as coauthors.

Since the last Disk Detectivedata release, ESA's (European Space Agency's) Gaia satellite has delivered an unprecedentedbounty of information about the locations, movements, and types of stars in theMilky Way. The Disk Detective science team used the new data from Gaia to identifyM dwarfs of interest to the project. A second improvement to the project is thatthe new images from the surveys listed above have higher resolution than the previousbatch of data, making more background objects visible.

"NASA needs your help,"Kuchner said. "Come discover these disks with us!"

About Disk Detective

Disk Detective is a NASA-fundedcitizen science project that is part of the NASA-sponsored Zooniverse citizen scienceplatform.

Check out the revamped Disk Detectiveproject at:

https://diskdetective.org

Learn more about NASA CitizenScience at:

https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience

AboutWISE and NEOWISE

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratoryin Southern California managed and operated WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directoratefrom 2009 to 2011. Edward Wright at the University of California, Los Angeles wasthe principal investigator. The mission was selected competitively under NASA'sExplorers Program managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,Maryland. In late 2013, the spacecraft was reactivated and renamed NEOWISE.

For more informationabout NEOWISE, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/neowise

http://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu/

For more informationabout WISE, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/wise

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/

News Media Contact

Elizabeth Landau NASA Headquarters 202-923-0167 elandau@nasa.gov

2020-137

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'Disk Detective' Needs Your Help Finding Disks Where Planets Form - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Rejecting the large range of unstable possibilities -- all the configurations that would lead to collisions -- would leave behind a sharper view of planetary systems around other stars, but it's not as easy as it sounds.

"Separating the stable from the unstable configurations turns out to be a fascinating and brutally hard problem," said Daniel Tamayo, a NASA Hubble Fellowship Program Sagan Fellow in astrophysical sciences at Princeton.

To make sure a planetary system is stable, astronomers need to calculate the motions of multiple interacting planets over billions of years and check each possible configuration for stability -- a computationally prohibitive undertaking.

Astronomers since Isaac Newton have wrestled with the problem of orbital stability, but while the struggle contributed to many mathematical revolutions, including calculus and chaos theory, no one has found a way to predict stable configurations theoretically.

Modern astronomers still have to 'brute-force' the calculations, albeit with supercomputers instead of abaci or slide rules.

Tamayo and his colleagues realized that they could accelerate the process by combining simplified models of planets' dynamical interactions with machine learning methods.

This allows the elimination of huge swaths of unstable orbital configurations quickly -- calculations that would have taken tens of thousands of hours can now be done in minutes.

He is the lead author on a paper detailing the approach in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Co-authors of the new study include David Spergel, director of the Flatiron Institute`s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) in New York City, as well as CCA group leaders Phil Armitage and Shirley Ho.

"Despite centuries of effort, the mechanisms that drive planetary systems unstable remain debated," Armitage said.

The new work "demonstrates that by combining our hard-won understanding of planetary dynamics with modern machine learning techniques, we can reliably predict the fate of an abundant class of known extrasolar planetary systems."

For most multi-planet systems, there are many orbital configurations that are possible given current observational data, of which not all will be stable.

Many configurations that are theoretically possible would 'quickly' -- that is, in not too many millions of years -- destabilize into a tangle of crossing orbits. The goal was to rule out those so-called 'fast instabilities.'

"We can't categorically say `This system will be OK, but that one will blow up soon," Tamayo said. "The goal instead is, for a given system, to rule out all the unstable possibilities that would have already collided and couldn`t exist at the present day.

"Instead of simulating a given configuration for a billion orbits -- the traditional brute-force approach, which would take about 10 hours -- Tamay's model instead simulates for 10,000 orbits, which only takes a fraction of a second.

From this short snippet, they calculate 10 summary metrics that capture the system`s resonant dynamics. Finally, they train a machine-learning algorithm to predict from these 10 features whether the configuration would remain stable if they let it keep going out to one billion orbits.

"We called the model SPOCK -- Stability of Planetary Orbital Configurations Klassifier -- partly because the model determines whether systems will `live long and prosper,`" Tamayo said.SPOCK determines the long-term stability of planetary configurations about 100,000 times faster than the previous approach, breaking the computational bottleneck.

"Machine learning methods have opened up new ground in what we can do in inferring the properties of planetary systems," Ho said.

Tamayo cautions that while he and his colleagues haven`t `solved` the general problem of planetary stability, SPOCK does reliably identify fast instabilities in compact systems, which they argue are the most important in trying to do stability constrained characterization.

"This new method will provide a clearer window into the orbital architectures of planetary systems beyond our own," Tamayo said.

In the past 25 years, astronomers have found more than 4,000 planets orbiting other stars, of which almost half are in multi-planet systems. But since small exoplanets are extremely challenging to detect, we still have an incomplete picture of their orbital configurations.

"More than 700 stars are now known to have two or more planets orbiting around them," said Michael Strauss, chair of Princeton`s Department of Astrophysical Sciences.

"Dan and his colleagues have found a fundamentally new way to explore the dynamics of these multi-planet systems, speeding up the computer time needed to make models by factors of 100,000. With this, we can hope to understand in detail the full range of solar system architectures that nature allows," added Strauss.

SPOCK is especially helpful for making sense of some of the faint, far-distant planetary systems recently spotted by the Kepler telescope, says Jessie Christiansen, an astrophysicist with the NASA Exoplanet Archive who was not involved in this research.

"It`s hard to constrain their properties with our current instruments," she said.

"Are they rocky planets, ice giants, or gas giants? Or something new? This new tool will allow us to rule out potential planet compositions and configurations that would be dynamically unstable -- and it lets us do it more precisely and on a substantially larger scale than was previously available," she added.

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Predicting fate of planetary systems, AI solves calculations that astronomers since Newton have struggled with - DNA India

ByChanapa Tantibanchachai

As dying stars take their final few breaths of life, they gently sprinkle their ashes into the cosmos and the magnificent planetary nebulae. These ashes, spread via the stellar winds, are enriched with different chemical elements, including carbon. Findings from a Johns Hopkins study published in Nature Astronomy show that the final moments of these dying stars, called white dwarfs, shed light on carbon's origin in the Milky Way.

"The findings pose new, stringent constraints on how and when carbon was produced by stars of our galaxy, ending up within the raw material from which the Sun and its planetary system were formed 4.6 billion years ago," says Jeffrey Cummings, an associate research scientist in the Johns Hopkins University's Department of Physics & Astronomy and an author on the paper.

The origin of carbon, an element essential to life on Earth, in the Milky Way galaxy is still debated among astrophysicists. Some believe low-mass stars whose carbon-rich envelopes were blown away by stellar winds became white dwarfs, and others believe carbon was synthesized in the winds of massive stars that eventually exploded as supernovae.

Using data collected from the Keck Observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii between August and September 2018, the researchers analyzed white dwarfs belonging to the Milky Way's open star clusters. Open star clusters are groups of up to a few thousand stars held together by mutual gravitational attraction.

From their analysis, the research team measured the white dwarfs' masses, and using the theory of stellar evolution, also calculated their masses at birth.

Jeffrey Cummings

Associate research scientist

The connection between the birth masses to the final white dwarf masses is called the initial-final mass relation, a fundamental diagnostic in astrophysics that contains the entire life cycles of stars. Previous research always found an increasing linear relationship: the more massive the star at birth, the more massive the white dwarf is left at its death.

But when Cummings and his colleagues calculated the initial-final mass relation, they were shocked to find that the white dwarfs from this group of open clusters had larger masses than astrophysicists previously believed. This discovery, they realized, broke the linear trend other studies always found. In other words, stars born roughly 1 billion years ago in the Milky Way didn't produce white dwarfs of about 0.60-0.65 solar masses, as it was commonly thought, but they died leaving behind more massive remnants of about 0.7-0.75 solar masses.

The researchers say that this kink in the trend explains how carbon from low-mass stars made its way into the Milky Way. In the last phases of their lives, stars twice as massive as the Milky Way's Sun produced new carbon atoms in their hot interiors, transported them to the surface, and finally spread them into the surrounding interstellar environment through gentle stellar winds. The research team's stellar models indicate that the stripping of the carbon-rich outer mantle occurred slowly enough to allow the central cores of these stars, the future white dwarfs, to grow considerably in mass.

The team calculated that stars had to be at least 1.5 solar masses to spread its carbon-rich ashes upon death.

The findings, according to the study's first author Paola Marigo, from the University of Padova, helps scientists understand the properties of galaxies in the universe. By combining the theories of cosmology and stellar evolution, the researchers expect that bright carbon-rich stars close to their deaths, like the progenitors of the white dwarfs analyzed in this study, are presently contributing to the light emitted by very distant galaxies. This light, which carries the signature of newly produced carbon, is routinely collected by the large telescopes from space and Earth to probe the evolution of cosmic structures. Therefore, this new understanding of how carbon is synthesized in stars also means having a more reliable interpreter of the light from the far universe.

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Study: Dying stars breathe life into Earth - The Hub at Johns Hopkins

Astronomy and physics have struggled with diversity and inclusion for as long as those fields have existed. But, as a recent report explained in depth, institutions have the power to improve.

The report, which was published in late 2019 by the American Institute of Physics' (AIP) National Task Force to Elevate African American Representation in Undergraduate Physics and Astronomy (TEAM-UP), pointed out inequalities in the two fields and outlined changes that institutions like universities can make in order to increase support for and participation by African American students in physics and astronomy.

So, why this report and this work is so important? "We never know where our next great idea is coming from," TEAM-UP Task Force member Tabbetha Dobbins, an assistant professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Rowan University, told Space.com.

To encapsulate the complex obstacles that African American students face in these fields and develop comprehensive solutions, TEAM-UP spent two years investigating the reasons African American students are underrepresented in physics. The report was motivated by findings showing that, according to the study, "the number and percentage of bachelor's degrees awarded to African Americans in these fields has been appallingly low."

As the report states, "the number and percentage of bachelors degrees awarded to African Americans in these fields," dropped "from about 5% in the late 1990s to less than 4% in recent years." The report added that over the past 20 years, while the number of bachelor's degrees in physics in the U.S. has dramatically increased overall, African American representation has not grown past levels observed in 1995.

The report found that the underrepresentation of African Americans in physics and astronomy is caused by two main factors: the lack of a supportive environment and financial challenges. "Solving these problems requires addressing systemic and cultural issues, and creating a large-scale change management framework," the report read.

The overall goal of the TEAM-UP report is to "at least double the number of bachelor's degrees in physics and astronomy awarded to African Americans by 2030," according to the report. Among the many key findings in the report is that fostering a sense of belonging in African American students in these fields is crucial for their success, and interactions with both faculty and peers can impact this sense of belonging.

The report's findings highlighted three major factors that are critical in supporting African American students, Dobbins told Space.com. First, students have to "feel a sense of belonging at the institution level and in the department," she said.

Second, the task force found that in order to persist in their chosen fields, African American students "must perceive themselves, and be perceived by others, as future physicists and astronomers," according to the report. Having that identify and being able to see themselves in that role is critical, Dobbins said.

"The third factor is effective teaching and mentoring students," Dobbins continued, adding that this will require inclusive approaches. Additionally, institutions can't just have "lone mentors," or individual faculty members who alone try to take on "all of the mentoring of students from diverse groups in the department," she said. "That's not sustainable."

The report analyzes systemic issues that persist for African American students and provides specific, detailed solutions that institutions can implement.

"Leaders in every institution of higher education, and every professional society representing a STEM discipline, should study this report and determine which recommendations make the most sense in their context," Edmund Bertschinger, a professor of physics at MIT who serves as a co-chair with TEAM-UP, told Space.com in an email.

However, Bertschinger added, predominantly white universities often have more resources to implement these recommended actions than Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). "This is compensated somewhat by the fact that many of the recommendations are already implemented at HBCUs," he said.

So, what is it really like for people who are part of marginalized groups working in these fields? Space.com spoke to a handful of researchers about their experiences in physics and astronomy and how being a part of a marginalized population has affected them both personally and professionally.

Naia Butler-Craig, a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Fellow at Georgia Tech's High-Power Electric Propulsion Lab who was not involved in this report, shared her experiences and thoughts about these issues.

"It's definitely affected my comfort," she told Space.com. "It's not that I ever wanted to leave, it's more so that I was worried about people coming after me that would have to experience that."

Butler-Craig added that she didn't want those who have perpetrated harassment "to perpetuate that behavior to someone younger than me and push them out of a STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] field."

Sian Proctor, a STEM communicator, analog astronaut and geology, sustainability and planetary science professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Arizona who was not involved in this report, reflected on the continued lack of diversity in speakers at space and science events, she told Space.com in an email.

"The biggest issue I face when I point out a lack of diversity for conference keynotes to my already included Caucasian friends is that they always say, 'You should say something.' Which makes me laugh," Proctor said. "You are at the table already so why aren't you saying something? We need white males to speak up and call out any lack of diversity and/or inclusion. They should have a list of people of color readily available to share when they do raise concerns so that they are part of the solution."

Lauren Chambers, a technology fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts who was not involved in this report, agreed with the findings from the report shared her thoughts with Space.com in an email.

"The report's findings agree with not only my own experiences in astronomy, but also with previous reading I've done on the culture of the field," Chambers told Space.com. "Systemic racism is wholly pervasive in astrophysics as it is in every academic field."

In 2019, Chambers submitted her 2017 undergraduate African American studies thesis as a white paper, called "A Different Kind of Dark Energy: Evidence for Placing Race and Gender in Physics," to the Astro2020 Decadal Survey. She also recently published a public letter on the topic of diversity and inclusion in astronomy titled "A Break-up Letter with Astronomy, From a Young Black Woman."

"Any individual experiences I've had brushing up against issues of discrimination are but symptoms of these larger problems," Chambers said. "In order to create a truly inclusive space for non-white students, astronomy must reimagine their systems, not just play whack-a-mole with the symptoms."

Isabel Rodriguez, an astrophysics graduate student at Oregon State University who also serves as vice president of the Black Graduate Student Association who was not involved in the report, also shared her experiences in the field.

"I graduated with my bachelors in physics in 2018, the only Black woman in my cohort. In my graduate institution, I am currently the only Black woman in my department," Rodriguez told Space.com in an email. "When I struggled during my first year of graduate school, I had professors who felt that I either wasnt studying hard enough or simply wasnt good enough to do physics."

Rodriguez ended up actually changing the course of her career because of these experiences. She shared this decision in a piece published July 2019 titled "Reclaiming my state of mind: Why I'm leaving my PhD program."

"In reality," she continued, "I felt isolated, unsupported, and lacked a sense of belonging. I had actually started at Oregon State as a Ph.D. student, but by the end of the year decided to switch tracks and Master out," Rodriguez said.

The American Institute of Physics' (AIP) National Task Force to Elevate African American Representation in Undergraduate Physics and Astronomy (TEAM-UP) published this report in 2019.

Follow Chelsea Gohd on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Space has a diversity problem and big institutions like universities can do something about it - Space.com

A forty-year-old puzzle regarding the production of lithium in stars has been solved by Indian researchers. Stars, as per known mechanisms of evolution, actually destroy lithium as they evolve into red giants. Planets were known to have more lithium than their stars as is the case with the Earth-Sun pair. However, leading to a contradiction, some stars were found that were lithium-rich. The new work by Bharat Kumar, currently a post doctoral fellow at the National Astronomical Observatories of China, Beijing, and an international team of co-workers shows that, in fact, when stars grow beyond their Red Giant stage into what is known as the Red Clump stage, they produce lithium in what is known as a Helium Flash and this is what enriches them with lithium. The study has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy on July 7.

Lithium, a light element commonly used today in communication device technology, has an interesting story. It was first produced in the Big Bang, around 13.7 billion years ago when the universe came into being, along with other elements. While the abundance of other elements grew millions of times, the present abundance of lithium in the universe is only four times the original [Big Bang] value. It is actually destroyed in the stars. The Sun, for instance, has about a factor of 100 lower amount of lithium than the Earth. About 40 years ago, a few large stars were spotted that were lithium-rich. This was followed by further discoveries of lithium-rich stars, and that posed a puzzle if stars do not produce lithium, how do some stars develop to become lithium rich?

The planet engulfment theory was quite popular. For example, Earth-like planets may increase the stars lithium content when they plunge into [their] stars atmosphere when the latter become Red Giants. I was not comfortable with this idea, said Professor Eswar Reddy, Director of India Thirty Meter Telescope Centre, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, who led the study.

Prof. Reddy has been working on this puzzle for nearly 20 years now, and had, along with his students, devised a method of measuring lithium content using low-resolution spectra in a large number of stars, with facilities provided at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics.

For the present study, the group studied over 200,000 stars using the Galactic Archaeology survey of the Anglo-Australian Telescope, Australia. This is a dedicated facility for obtaining high-resolution spectra for a large number of stars, explains Prof. Reddy. This is the first study to demonstrate that lithium abundance enhancement among low mass giant stars is common. Until now, it was believed that only about 1% of giants are lithium rich. Secondly, the team has shown that as the star evolves beyond the Red Giant stage, and before it reaches the Red Clump stage, there is a helium flash which produces an abundance of lithium. Lastly, they set a lower limit for helium abundance which will classify the star as lithium-rich. This value is about 250 times lower than the previous limit.

The study challenges the present understanding of nucleosynthesis in stars. Our next study may concentrate on helium-flash nucleosynthesis and how lithium escapes from destruction in the interior of stars and dredges-up to the surface, said Prof. Reddy.

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A forty-year-old puzzle about the stars is solved - The Hindu

If you had told Samuel Hinton six months ago that he would be spending half his working hours crunching corona data, he would probably have assumed you were talking about the plasma aura around some star.

Instead, the University of Queensland astrophysicist is leading a project to synthesise data on Covid-19 patients from 48 countries.

The skills that you get from astrophysics it turns out theyre fairly translatable, Dr Hinton said. In astrophysics we get raw, messy data that we cant use from a telescope. Wetake this data, homogenise it, process it [and] store it somewhere [so that] we can actually make use of it.

Its the same in the Covid collaboration. We take raw, messy data but instead of from a telescope, we take it from hospitals. You swap the telescope [for] 350 hospitals and hope you can get something of value.

As lead data analyst for the Covid-19 Critical Care Consortium, Dr Hinton has constructed what the Australian Academy of Science refers to as a data science pipeline. It ingests raw clinical data from around the world and processes it into a usable form for machine learning and statistical analysis.

Dr Hinton also built and maintained an interactive dashboard which aggregates the data and provides snapshot summaries for clinical teams. You could say: What is the chance that a person would develop this complication, whether theyre male or female, whether they come from the US or not?

The pandemic has bowled up new surprises for Dr Hinton, who was a contestant in the reality TV showAustralian Survivorduring his doctoral studies in 2018. Early this year he accepted a Chamberlain postdoctoral fellowship with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US. Im supposed to be there pretty soon, but obviously that isnt happening.

Hegot married in April and spent his wedding night plotting data for clinical staff at the Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane. We were having the global consortium meeting the next night and needed the plots done.

The Academy has highlighted Dr Hintons efforts as an example of the unexpected spin-offs from Australias research strength in astronomy. Amid-term reviewof Australias 10-year plan for the discipline, overseen by the Academys National Committee for Astronomy, has found that Australias optical and radio observatories currently among the worlds best have fostered the application of advanced data analytics in completely unrelated fields.

Other by-products have included technologies that boost the output of solar farms, improve situational awareness and reduce vibrations in harsh environments.

Meanwhile, Australian researchers have played their part in some of the biggest astronomical discoveries of the past decade. They include the detection of gravitational waves and the use of mysterious fast radio bursts to find the universes missing matter floating around in interstellar space.

Review panel member Tamara Davis said that Australia had a natural advantage in astronomy research because of our radio-quiet skies and important southern hemisphere location. Many countries want to be involved in telescopes in Australia.

The review offers nine recommendations to consolidate Australias standing in the field. They include completing Australias component of the Square Kilometre Array radio observatory, funding Australian-built instrumentation for the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile, laying the foundations for a gravitational wave detector in the southern hemisphere, and achieving full membership of the European Southern Observatory.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com

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From cosmos to corona: an astrophysicist takes on the pandemic - Times Higher Education (THE)