When most of us picture the shape of the Milky Way, the galaxy that contains our own sun and hundreds of billions of other stars, we think of a central mass surrounded by a flat disc of stars that spiral around it. However, astronomers know that rather than being symmetrical, the disc structure is warped, more like the brim of a fedora, and that the warped edges are constantly moving around the outer rim of the galaxy.

If you have ever seen the audience making a wave in a stadium, its very similar to that concept, said Xinlun Cheng, an astronomy graduate student in the University of Virginias College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Each member of the audience stands up and then sits down at the correct time and in the correct order to create the wave as it goes around the stadium. Thats exactly what stars in our galaxy are doing. Only in this case, as the wave is going around the galaxys disk, the galaxy disk is also rotating around the center of the galaxy. In terms of the sports-fan analogy, its as if the stadium itself is also rotating.

What caused that warp to occur has been the subject of debate. Some researchers suggest that the phenomenon is a result of the instability of the galaxy itself, while others assert that it is the remnant of a collision with another galaxy in the distant past.

A recent article published in The Astrophysical Journal by Cheng, who studies the movements of the stars, and his colleagues, Borja Anguiano, a post-doctoral research associate at UVA, and Steven Majewski, a professor in the Colleges Department of Astronomy, may finally put that debate to rest.

Using data from the Gaia space observatory, a satellite launched in 2013 by the European Space Agency to measure the positions, distances and motions of billions of stars and information from APOGEE, an infrared spectrograph developed by UVA to examine the chemical composition and motions of stars, astronomers now have the tools to observe the movements of the stars in the Milky Way with an unprecedented degree of accuracy.

By combining information from the APOGEE instrument with information from the Gaia satellite, were starting to understand how the different components of the galaxy are moving, said Anguiano, who is interested both in the movements of those components and what phenomena may have originally caused those movements to occur.

It is now possible to characterize those movements with unprecedented accuracy because of the precision and statistical robustness of the huge catalogue of stars that has been probed by the Gaia satellite, Majewski explained. Meanwhile, our own large database of stellar chemistries generated by APOGEE gives us the unique ability to infer stellar ages. This allows us to explore how stars of different age participate in the warp and lets us zero in on when it was created. Knowing this, then, gives us an idea of why it was created.

Using those data, Cheng and his colleagues have developed a model that characterizes the parameters of the galactic warp, where it begins in the outer disk, how fast the warp is moving and the shape of the warp. The model has helped them determine that the warp, which doesnt affect our own sun, but is passing our solar system now at speeds that allow it to make a full rotation around the galaxy every 450 million years, is not a result of the Milky Ways own internal mass. Instead, it is the relic of gravitational tugging on the Milky Ways disk by the nearby passage of a satellite galaxy, possibly the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy, about 3 billion years ago.

We can still see the disk of our galaxy shaking as a result, Anguiano said.

The data the team collected from the new tools available to astronomers may be just the beginning of a new wave of discoveries about our universe and how it came to be.

Were entering an age in astronomy, especially in galactic astronomy, in which we are measuring the movement of the stars at such a level of precision that we can map their past orbital paths and start to understand how they may have been affected at earlier times and how other galaxies approaching our own interacted with stars as they were being born, Anguiano said. This level of precision has opened a new door to understanding our galaxys past and how it was assembled.

The article, Exploring the Galactic Warp through Asymmetries in the Kinematics of the Galactic Disk, by Cheng and his colleagues, was published in the December issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

See the original post:

A Warp in the Milky Way Linked to Galactic Collision - University of Virginia

I have a couple of updates on some news stories I've been following for quite some time, both of which caused quite a stir when first announced: Phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, and dust causing the dimming of Betelgeuse in late 2019/early 2020.

The versions of both are: Venusian phosphine may have actually been sulfur dioxide, and Betelgeuse dimming may have been from it getting cooler.

You may recall that back in September 2020 a team of astronomers announced they may have found evidence of the molecule phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. Normally that would be a pretty esoteric discovery, but the thing is you wouldn't expect to find that particular molecule there, since it gets destroyed pretty easily in the hellish environment of Venus and, on Earth, phosphine is made primarily by anaerobic bacteria as they dine on dead things that used to be alive.

So yeah, kind of a big deal. But then doubt was cast on that, with other scientists saying that the data used weren't calibrated using the right files, which could make it look like phosphine was seen when it's not actually there. There were some other issues as well.

The original team then responded, saying that the detection persisted when they used updated calibration files, though it was weaker. But then things got interesting.

The astronomers who made the original discovery looked at a spectrum, breaking the light from Venus up into individual colors. Different molecules absorb light at different specific colors, allowing them to be IDed. However, sometimes molecules absorb very similar if not overlapping colors, confusing the issue. A new paper has come out making this very point, saying that sulfur dioxide (SO2) has been mistaken for phosphine, since it absorbs light at the same wavelength as phosphine.

It's an interesting argument. Sulfur dioxide is known to exist in the Venusian atmosphere, and they argue (using models of the planet's atmosphere) that the signature seen in the data could be explained by SO2 existing in a layer about 80 km above the surface of Venus. Phosphine was claimed to be seen about 50 km up, but the new paper argues phosphine would be rapidly destroyed there.

The argument is compelling, and could very well be correct. Phosphine may not be what was seen in the first place. The problem here is these data were on the edge of what could be seen, so without getting further, deeper observations the issue may not get resolved. I expect we'll be hearing more from the original team about this soon, too.

Moving from a planet 40 million kilometers away to a bloated star 640 (or possibly 530) light years away, let's talk Betelgeuse.

The iconic star shocked everyone in late 2019 when its brightness plummeted like a stone, dimming by about 50%. It was easily noticeable by eye, and fairly freaky how rapidly it dimmed.

Betelgeuse is a known variable star, with its brightness varying by several percent on a couple of different cycles. But this deep plunge was unprecedented, and weird. Astronomers immediately started coming up with ideas to explain it. One was giant starspots, which turned out not to be very likely. Another was that perhaps its temperature dropped. A third, and the one I felt was most likely due to support from different sources, is that it belched out a huge cloud of dust that blocked some of its light.

But a new paper has just been published which brings temperature up again. Or down, I suppose: They show that part of Betelgeuse's upper atmosphere could have cooled quite a bit, explaining the drop in light.

Stars emit light because they're hot. If they cool down, they get fainter. However, Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, an enormous bag of gas more massive and far, far larger than the Sun. The physics of its outer layers is very complex, and not terribly well understood.

The upper parts of the star physically expand and contract over a period of months to years, making the star brighter and dimmer, changing its color slightly as well as the temperature. In the new work, the authors show that parts of Betelgeuse's upper atmosphere may have cooled by several hundred degrees, explaining the dimming.

They looked at the molecule titanium oxide (TiO), which is commonly seen in very cool stars. It absorbs light at very specific colors in a characteristic way, and what they found is that the absorption by TiO changed when Betelgeuse was dimmer, indicating it was cooler than previously thought. The exact temperature drop is hard to determine, but at one point they show a clear drop of 150 Kelvins (one degree Celsius = 1 Kelvin). They claim that if the temperature dropped by 250 K then no dust is needed at all to explain the dimming.

Complicating this is that extremely high-resolution images of the star show that only the southern hemisphere faded, so it's likely (they reason) the temperature drop happened there. If the temperature only dropped in one part of the atmosphere it would be hard to find out how much, because the northern hemisphere stayed the same, confusing the measurement. So a 250K drop isn't necessarily unreasonable.

It makes me wonder if more than one cause is behind the dimming then, both dust and a temperature drop. That's not out of the question; when something extreme happens in the Universe it's commonly because two or more phenomena ganged up to increase their effect. I'm speculating here, but I certainly wouldn't rule that out.

Funny: Venus is the brightest planet in our sky and the one that gets closest to Earth, and Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the sky and also relatively close as stars go. Yet for both, mysteries abound.

There's a lot we know and understand well about the cosmos we live in, but there's also a whole lot we don't, even about our next-door neighbors. And these back-and-forth arguments by scientists about data and cause and physics are normal for science; when we push the boundaries of knowledge it takes time to figure out what we're seeing. I expect both of these mysteries will be solved to everyone's satisfaction, and then we'll move on to the next weird thing Venus and Betelgeuse will do. That's the way the Universe works.

Read more:

UPDATES: Phosphineless Venus and dustless Betelgeuse? - SYFY WIRE

This article was originally published atThe Conversation.The publication contributed the article to Space.com'sExpert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Ian Glass, Associate Research Astronomer, South African Astronomical Observatory

TheSouth African Astronomical Observatoryin Cape Town is the oldest permanent observatory in the southern hemisphere: it turned 200 in 2020.

This observatory is a fundamental part of South Africas long history of astronomical research, which began when French academicNicolas-Louis de La Caillevisited Cape Town from 1751 to 1753. He undertook a careful examination of every square degree of the southern sky. This resulted in the first comprehensive sky survey ever made, in either hemisphere.

The Royal Observatory, Cape Town of Good Hope (today the South African Astronomical Observatory) was established in 1820. It became and remained for 150 years the most important source of star positions in the southern hemisphere sky. This was in terms of both accuracy and the number of measurements made. In the years that followed its foundation, the observatorys laborious work led to important scientific discoveries.

Cape astronomers were responsible for, among other things, the first measurement of the distance to a star; the first photographic sky survey and the accurate measurement of the distance to the sun. They were at the forefront of developments in stellar spectroscopy. This is the detailed analysis of a stars light to find out its composition and movement towards or away from the sun. They also determined the shape of the earth in the southern hemisphere and conducted the first accurate country-wide survey measurements of southern Africa.

In 1543 the mathematician and astronomerNicolaus Copernicusasserted that the earth orbits the sun. This meant that people should be able to observe the apparent shift in the position of the nearest stars from different points in the earths orbit. But that had not been observed in the centuries that followed. The reason was, of course, that even the nearest stars are incredibly far away and the effect being looked for is very small.

When the Royal Observatory was founded in 1820, it was equipped with the most accurate star position measuring devices available. Eleven years later Thomas Henderson used those devices to make the first believable measurements of this effect, known as parallax. By observing the angular movement of Alpha Centauri still the second-closest star known to us and knowing also the size of the earths orbit, this gave the distance to the star by simple trigonometry.

A different technology, photography, would lead to more important astronomical discoveries at the Cape. All observatories in the 19th century made precise observations of star positions one by one and published catalogues of these. In 1882 the head of the Royal Observatory, David Gill, was surprised to receive a letter from a Mr Simpson, an amateur photographer in Aberdeen, a town elsewhere in the Cape.

Simpson had managed to photograph a bright comet that had just appeared. His photographic plates were sensitive enough to register stars in the background. This led to a lightbulb moment for Gill: he realised that the positions of stars could now be recorded in quantity on a permanent medium, more reliably than any visual observer could ever hope to do.

So he set up a special photographic telescope using the largest lens that he could find and set about making the first photographic star catalogue. This was called theCape Photographic Durchmusterungafter its much more laboriously compiled northern hemisphere equivalent, put together in Bonn, Germany.

But it wasnt just Cape Town that hosted an important astronomical site.

In 1903, theJohannesburg Observatorywas established. It achieved its greatest success in 1915 when its director, Robert Innes, discovered a very faint star near Alpha Centauri.

On various grounds he claimed it to be the nearest star to Earth; it took many years of investigation before this could be verified. The new discovery was named Proxima Centauri, meaning the nearest in the constellation Centaurus. Not only was it the nearest star but at that time of discovery it was the least luminous star ever discovered. Other dimmer stars have been found since, but Proxima still retains its nearest star status and its distance has been thoroughly verified from space satellites.

In 1948 the private Radcliffe Foundation in the United Kingdom set up in Pretoria what was for a time the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere and joint fourth largest in the world. This is a title currently held by theSouthern African Large Telescope.

Early on in the Radcliffes existence the then director, David Thackeray, and his colleague Adriaan Wesselink discovered in our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a number of RR Lyrae variable stars that astronomers using smaller telescopes could not detect. These are stars that change their brightness in a well-defined manner over a cycle of a few days and whose average wattage is completely predictable.

By measuring the Magellanic Cloud stars average apparent brightnesses and comparing them to other RR Lyrae stars at known distances they determined that the cosmic distance scale originally published two decades before by Edwin Hubble and others was underestimated by about a factor of two. In effect, they doubled the size of the Universe. This result was announced to great acclaim at the triennial meeting of theInternational Astronomical Union in 1952.

Today South African astronomy remains at the forefront of many initiatives and discoveries. It has become a leader in the field of radio astronomy with the MeerKAT telescope near Carnarvon and will within a decade be the host of an international project, theSquare Kilometre Array.

This article is adapted froma piecethat initially appeared in the South African National Research Foundations Science Matters Magazine.

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates and become part of the discussion on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

Read the original:

South African astronomy has a long, rich history of discovery and a promising future - Space.com

By Dirk Lorenzen

2021 begins as a year of Mars. Although our red planetary neighbor isn't as prominent as it was last autumn, it is still noticeable with its characteristic reddish color in the evening sky until the end of April. In early March, Mars shines close to the star cluster Pleiades in the constellation Taurus.

But for space nerds, Mars is already the center of attention in February. Three space probes that were launched in the summer of 2020 will arrive on the red planet.

On February 9, "Hope," the first interplanetary mission of the United Arab Emirates, is set to enter orbit around Mars. Only one day later, the Chinese probe Tianwen-1 will join it. The name means "heavenly questions," referring to a famous piece of ancient poetry.

Both missions will take surface and atmospheric measurements of Mars. Probably in May, a small rover will detach from the Chinese spacecraft and make its way down to the surface to explore the surroundings of the landing site.

NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover (shown in artist's illustration) is the most sophisticated rover NASA has ever sent to Mars. Ingenuity, a technology experiment, will be the first aircraft to attempt controlled flight on another planet. Perseverance will arrive at Mars' Jezero Crater with Ingenuity attached to its belly. NASA

The highlight of this year's Mars exploration is the landing of the NASA rover "Perseverance" on February 18. Once the spacecraft enters the atmosphere it will be slowed down by friction. The heat shield will surpass 1,000 degrees Celsius. Later, parachutes will deploy to slow it down even more. Roughly two kilometers above the planet's surface, a sky crane comes into play. Four thrusters keep the crane properly oriented.

The rover is connected to the crane by nylon tethers. Upon approach of Mars' surface, the sky crane will lower Perseverance down about 7 meters. Once the rover has touched down, the tethers are cut and the sky crane flies off to land somewhere else on the surface.

Entry, descent and landing takes just seven minutes the so-called seven minutes of terror. The flight team can't interact with the spacecraft on Mars. Experts have to sit and watch what's happening more than 200 million kilometers away. Radio signals from the spacecraft need about 11 minutes to travel in one direction. When the control center in Pasadena, California receives the message that entry has begun, Perseverance will already be on the ground. There is only one chance for a smooth landing. Any error could mean the mission is lost. The audacious sky crane maneuver would be a great feat in any action movie. But NASA knows how to do it the Curiosity rover landed with a sky crane in 2012.

Scientists want to use Perseverance to explore whether there is or ever has been life on Mars. Today the planet is a hostile environment dry and cold with no magnetic field shielding the harsh radiation from space. Life as we know it can't survive on the Martian surface right now. But billions of years ago, Mars was hotter and wetter and had a shield against radiation. So it is at least plausible that simple microbes developed there. Maybe they live in the soil now, one or two meters below the surface. Perseverance will collect samples to find out. A future mission by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will pick up the samples and return them to Earth. But this won't happen before 2030.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been orbiting the Earth for more than 30 years. NASA

The Hubble Space Telescope's images of planets, nebulae, star clusters and galaxies are legendary. The cosmic eye, launched in 1990, is likely to fail towards the end of this decade. The James Webb Space Telescope will be its successor. It is scheduled to launch on October 31 with a European Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana.

The launch date is about 14 years later than planned when the project began in 1997. At almost $10 billion (8.2 billion), the telescope is more than ten times as expensive as originally conceived. Its namesake James Webb was the NASA administrator during the height of the Apollo project in the 1960s.

Astronomers expect completely new insights from James Webb Telescope images, such as how the universe came into being, how it developed and how galaxies, stars and planets are formed. The instrument will observe the earliest childhood of the cosmos and photograph objects that already existed in the universe 200 to 300 million years after the Big Bang. James Webb, as the experts call the telescope for short, may even provide information about possibly inhabited exoplanets planets like ours orbiting stars other than the Sun.

The fully assembled James Webb Space Telescope with its sunshield and unitized pallet structures that will fold up around the telescope for launch. NASA

The mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope is 6.5 meters in diameter and consists of 18 hexagonal segments. The entire instrument unfolds in 178 steps over a period of several months. Only then probably in the spring of 2022 will we see its first images.

Many communication or reconnaissance satellites only unfold in space. However, not every micrometer is as important as with this telescope.

NIRSpec, one of the four cameras on board, was built at Airbus in Ottobrunn near Munich. It is made of an unusual material: ceramic. Both the basic structure and the mirrors are made of this very light, hard and extremely temperature-insensitive material. With good reason the large camera has to withstand a lot in space. It is cooled to around -250 degrees Celsius in order to register the weak infrared or thermal radiation from the depths of space. Plastic or metal bend and lead to blurred images. Ceramic, on the other hand, remains in perfect shape.

The NIRSpec instrument will examine, among other things, emerging stars and distant galaxies. The ceramic camera is incredibly sensitive it could register the heat radiation from a burning cigarette on the Moon. Thanks to this precision, astronomers will get completely new insights into the cosmos with the James Webb Telescope and NIRSpec.

It's not very likely that the Orion spacecraft from NASA and ESA will start its maiden voyage to the Moon before the end of 2021. As part of the Artemis-1 mission, it will remain in space for four weeks and will orbit the Moon for a few days. There will be no crew on board for the first flight, but two dummies from the German Aerospace Center, which use thousands of sensors to measure the conditions that human beings would be exposed to. The Orion capsule comes from NASA, while the ESA supplies the service module. The service module, which is being built by Airbus in Bremen, provides propulsion, navigation, altitude control and the supply of air, water and fuel. After problems with an engine test in mid-January, the new NASA large rocket Space Launch System (SLS), with which Orion is supposed to be launched, is unlikely to be operational until early 2022.

Matthias Maurer from Saarland is scheduled to fly to the International Space Station (ISS) in October. The flight will be in a Crew Dragon capsule from Cape Canaveral. Maurer will live and work in the orbital outpost for six months. He is currently training to work on numerous scientific experiments. Maurer will be the twelfth German in space.

So far, Germany has only sent men into space. In mid-March, ESA will start the next application process for astronauts. A few years ago, the private initiative Die Astronautin ("She is an astronaut") showed that there are numerous excellent female applicants.

Even if there is no flight to the Moon, sky fans are looking forward to two eclipses this year. On May 26, there will be a lunar eclipse between 9:45 and 12:53 UTC. From 11:10 to 11:28 UTC, the Moon will be completely in the Earth's shadow. It can then only be seen in a copper-red light. This is sunlight that is directed into the Earth's shadow by the Earth's atmosphere reddish, like the sky at sunset. This eclipse can be observed throughout the Pacific, and will be best viewed in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Antarctica. In Europe, the Moon will be below the horizon and therefore the eclipse will not be visible.

This also the case for the partial lunar eclipse on November 19. From 07:18 to 10:47 UTC, the Moon will be partly in the shadow of the Earth. In the middle of the eclipse (around 9:03 UTC) 98% of the Moon will be eclipsed. The spectacle will be best seen in North America, Greenland, East Asia and much of the Pacific, such as Hawaii and New Zealand.

In 2021, the Moon will pass right in front of the sun, twice. On June 10, the moon will be nearly in the furthest point of its elliptical orbit around Earth. So it will be too small to cover the sun completely. In the middle of this eclipse, an annulus of the sun will remain visible. The sun's ring of fire appears between 9:55 and 11:28 UTC for a maximum of four minutes but it will only be visible in the very sparsely populated areas of northeast Canada, northwestern Greenland, the North Pole and the far east of Siberia.

In the North Atlantic, Europe and large parts of Russia, an eclipse will be seen at least partially. Between 8:12 and 13:11 UTC, the Sun will appear like a cookie that has been bitten into as the Moon covers parts of the bright disk. In some places, the eclipse will last about two hours. In Central Europe, a maximum of one-fifth of the sun will be covered.

The celestial event of the year will be a total solar eclipse on December 4. In a 400-kilometer-wide strip, the New Moon will cover the sun completely. For a maximum of one minute and 54 seconds, day will turn to night. For that short time, the brightest stars can be seen in the sky and the flaming solar corona can be seen around the dark disc of the Moon.

Unfortunately, hardly anyone will get to see this cosmic spectacle because the strip of totality only runs through the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic. From 7:03 to 8:04 UTC the umbra of the Moon moves across the Earth's surface and perhaps some ships' crews will enjoy the solar corona.

Only during the few minutes of totality is it possible to look safely at the Sun with the naked eye. During the partial phase or in the case of an annular eclipse, suitable protective goggles are necessary to watch the spectacle. Normal sunglasses are not safe. Looking unprotected into the sun can lead to severe eye damage or even blindness.

Venus, our other neighboring planet, will be behind the sun on March 26. It is not visible for the first few months of the year. From the end of April through Christmas, it will be visible as an evening star in the sky after sunset. The planet, shrouded in dense clouds, is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. The best visibility will be from September to December.

The giant planet Jupiter is in its best position of the year on August 20. It then shines in the constellation Capricorn, only disappearing from the evening sky at the beginning of next year. The ringed planet Saturn is also in the constellation Capricorn and can be observed particularly well on August 2.

Jupiter and Saturn are the stars of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and those of the long winter nights in the Southern Hemisphere. They are in the same area of the sky, almost forming a double star with Jupiter being the brighter of the two.

There are certain periods when the Earth crosses the orbital path of a comet and shooting stars are much more likely than on other nights. Many small stones and dust particles are scattered on comet orbits, which light up the Earth's atmosphere for a moment when they enter.

The Perseids are particularly promising: August 9-13, a few dozen meteors (the technical term for shooting stars) will scurry across the sky per hour. The traces of light will seem to come from the constellation Perseus, near the striking celestial W of Cassiopeia. The Geminids meteors coming from the constellation Gemini will be similarly exciting with up to 100 shooting stars per hour, December 10-15.

Reposted with permission from Deutsche Welle.

From Your Site Articles

Related Articles Around the Web

Read the original post:

2021: What Astronomical and Space Events Await Us This Year? - EcoWatch

A love of stargazing and a desire to meet new people inspired undergraduate student Samantha Bianco to introduce herself to Vanderbilt astronomy professor Keivan Stassun, but she never imagined the educational opportunities that would follow. Stassun invited her to participate in his research, and now, thanks to her passion for astronomy and the mentoring she has received, Bianco is a named co-author on a graduate-level scientific research paper and the first Vanderbilt student officially to have completed an Immersion Vanderbilt project.

Im really excited about the work Ive been doing in Professor Stassuns lab, and the whole experience has been challenging and awesome, said Bianco, a junior from Wauconda, Illinois, who is double-majoring in computer science and communication of science and technology.

Sam is just a great example of the quality and diversity of Vanderbilts undergraduates, said Stassun, Stevenson Chair in Physics, professor of astronomy and computer science and director of the Frist Center for Autism and Innovation. I think one of the real pleasures and benefits of working with students on immersion projects is that they bring so much aspiration and energy and excitement to the work.

In addition to Stassun, Ph.D. graduate student Dax Feliz, who came to Vanderbilt through the Fisk-Vanderbilt Masters-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program, has mentored Bianco.

Biancos Immersion Vanderbilt project looked for evidence of the presence of exoplanets around stars. Bianco and Feliz used data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which observes hundreds of thousands of star systems in hopes of detecting the presence of extrasolar planets.

She presented her research at a virtual Vanderbilt Research Fair in October and is now a co-author on a research paper submitted by Feliz.

Biancos immersion project is inspiring her plans for the future. When she graduates in 2022, shes interested in a career focused on the communication of science, specifically space science within an organization like NASA.

I really love the idea of taking something thats really complex with tons of scientific jargon and putting it into words that the general public can understand and be interested in, she said.

Stassun believes immersion projects are valuable because they focus students on design projects tied to their interests while giving them opportunities and skills needed for high-level research.

Making groundbreaking discoveries in science is a learned skill. The way we ensure the next generation of discoveries is to invest in training future researchers now, when they are at the beginning of their academic journey as undergraduates, he said. Its been just a great thrill and honor to be a part of Sams journey, of Daxs journey, of the labs journey together and to be representing Immersion Vanderbilt for the first time.

Immersion Vanderbilt provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to pursue their passions and cultivate intellectual interests through experiential learning. This intensive learning experience takes place in and beyond the classroom and culminates in the creation of a final project.

Immersion Vanderbilt became a degree requirement starting in fall 2018, but due to the unprecedented challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, undergraduate students in the Class of 2022 have a flexible option. Immersion Vanderbilt is now highly recommended but not required for undergraduate students who matriculated in the summer and fall of 2018 as well as those who joined the class later as transfer students.

More here:

Students fascination with astronomy inspires first completed Immersion Vanderbilt project - Vanderbilt University News

When black holes swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they're not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it's sucked towards the black hole, so bright we can detect them from Earth.

This is normal black hole behaviour. What isn't normal is for those X-ray flares to spew forth with clockwork regularity, a puzzling behaviour reported in 2019from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 250 million light-years away. Every nine hours, boom - X-ray flare.

After careful study, astronomer Andrew King of the University of Leicester in the UK identified a potential cause - a dead star that's endured its brush with a black hole, trapped on a nine-hour, elliptical orbit around it. Every close pass, or periastron, the black hole slurps up more of the star's material.

"This white dwarf is locked into an elliptical orbit close to the black hole, orbiting every nine hours," King explainedback in April 2020.

"At its closest approach, about 15 times the radius of the black hole's event horizon, gas is pulled off the star into an accretion disk around the black hole, releasing X-rays, which the two spacecraft are detecting."

The black hole is the nucleus of a galaxy called GSN 069, and it's pretty lightweight as far as supermassive black holes go - only 400,000 times the mass of the Sun. Even so, it's active, surrounded by a hot disc of accretion material, feeding into and growing the black hole.

According to King's model, this black hole was just hanging out, doing its active accretion thing, when a red giant star - the final evolutionary stages of a Sun-like star - happened to wander a little too close.

The black hole promptly divested the star of its outer layers, speeding its evolution into a white dwarf, the dead core that remains once the star has exhausted its nuclear fuel (white dwarfs shine with residual heat, not the fusion processes of living stars).

But rather than continuing on its journey, the white dwarf was captured in orbit around the black hole, and continued to feed into it.

Based on the magnitude of the X-ray flares, and our understanding of the flares that are produced by black hole mass transfer, and the star's orbit, King was able to constrain the mass of the star, too. He calculated that the white dwarf is around 0.21 times the mass of the Sun.

While on the lighter end of the scale, that's a pretty standard mass for a white dwarf. And if we assume the star is a white dwarf, we can also infer - based on our understanding of other white dwarfs and stellar evolution - that the star is rich in helium, having long ago run out of hydrogen.

"It's remarkable to think that the orbit, mass and composition of a tiny star 250 million light years away could be inferred," King said.

Based on these parameters, he also predicted that the star's orbit wobbles slightly, like a spinning top losing speed. This wobble should repeat every two days or so, and we may even be able to detect it, if we observe the system for long enough.

This could be one mechanism whereby black holes grow more and more massive over time. But we'll need to study more such systems to confirm it, and they may not be easy to detect.

For one, GSN 069's black hole is lower mass, which means that the star can travel on a closer orbit. To survive a more massive black hole, a star would have to be on a much larger orbit, which means any periodicity in the feeding would be easier to miss. And if the star were to stray too close, the black hole would destroy it.

But the fact that one has been identified offers hope that it's not the only such system out there.

"In astronomical terms, this event is only visible to our current telescopes for a short time - about 2,000 years, so unless we were extraordinarily lucky to have caught this one, there may be many more that we are missing elsewhere in the Universe," King said.

As for the star's future, well, if nothing else is to change, the star will stay right where it is, orbiting the black hole, and continuing to be slowly stripped for billions of years. This will cause it to grow in size and decrease in density - white dwarfs are only a little bigger than Earth - until it's down to a planetary mass, maybe even eventually turning into a gas giant.

"It will try hard to get away, but there is no escape," King said. "The black hole will eat it more and more slowly, but never stop."

The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A version of this article was first published in April 2020.

The rest is here:

Astronomers Have Discovered a Star That Survived Nearly Being Swallowed by a Black Hole - ScienceAlert

Nature is fond of patterns, on both the small scale and the large. Take the Fibonacci sequence, for instance the repeating pattern of numbers in which each subsequent number totals the sum of the previous two. The formula appears in nautilus' spiral shells, but also in the arrangement of the planets in the solar system, whose distances align roughly with Fibonacci numbers' ratios.

But the rough synchrony of our planets is nothing compared to the precise alignment of five newly-discovered exoplanets, which orbit their parent star with such a perfect harmony that it seems almost uncanny. According to a study published in the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, a solar system discovered by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is host to at least six planets, five of which orbit around the star known as TOI-178 (or TESS Object of Interest 178) in a preciseratio. This is known as a "chain of resonances," or a series of occasions in which planets orbit a star while maintaining a beatwith one another.

"A resonance between two planets is what happens when one completes a certain integer number of orbits while the other also does so," Dr. Nathan Hara, an astrophysicist at the University of Geneva and a co-author of the paper, wrote to Salon. "They therefore find themselves periodically in the same configuration and the strongest attraction between them is therefore always in the same direction."

There are a few details that make the new finding so striking. One is the fact that five planets are involved instead of two; as Hara explained, this makes it "one of the longest known chains" of resonant planets. In the case of the exoplanets surrounding TOI-178, they dance at a rhythm of 18:9:6:4:3. This means that every time the innermost planet in the chain makes 18 orbits around TOI-178, the next one in line makes nine orbits, and the one after that makes six orbits, and so on.

The finding is also significant because "in the known resonance chains, the farther the planet is from the star, the less dense it is, like in the Solar system: Mercury, Venus and Earth, Mars, have a higher density than Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune." The stars orbiting TOI-178 in synchrony, by contrast, have unusual comparative densities.

"The innermost planets are the densest ones, but then you have a planet with a very small, Saturn-like density, then it goes up again and falls off," Hara told Salon. "It is not shattering our understanding of planetary formation, but it is certainly puzzling."

He also told Salon that the discovery is helpful to scientists because TOI-178 is an unusually bright star indeed, the brightest star which is known to have transiting resonant chains.

"Here 'transiting'means that the planet passes between the star and the observer, so that the stellar light flux measured by the observer decreases periodically," Hara explained."This way you also get an estimate of the radius of the planet.The fact that the star is brighter means that we can gain information with other measurement techniques."

Hara told Salon that, in addition to TESS, the discovery was made possible by recent advances in astronomical technology including a European Space Agency telescope called CHEOPS, which was launched in 2019, and a state-of-the-art spectrograph known as ESPRESSO that has been operative since 2018.

"This one allows to measure the velocity of the star in the direction of the line of sight and has an unprecedented precision," Hara explained. "We would not have been able to make mass measurements of the planets of the system with the previous generation of spectrographs, or at the cost of extremely long campaigns."

As for how the resonant chain on planets exists, Hara told Salon that he has a partial hypothesis.

"The formation of resonant chains is believed to result from formations of planets at wider separations from the star which then migrate inwards together and are trappedin resonance with one another," Hara wrote. "As for the fact that the densities are not monotonically decreasing as you move away from the star, we don't really have a convincing explanation yet."

Read the original:

Astronomers discover a bizarre string of five planets that "dance" in perfect resonance - Salon

Laurel Kornfeld

January 26th, 2021

The late astronomer Ada Carrera, who now has a near-Earth asteroid named for her. Her name selected as the winner of an asteroid-naming contest sparked an online panel discussion by the contests sponsors about the role of women in astronomy Credit: Unistellar

The selection of the late astronomer Ada Amelia Carrera Rodriguez as the winner of an asteroid-naming contest sparked an online panel discussion by the contests sponsors about the role of women in astronomy.

In a joint project, the SETI Institute and the company Unistellar sponsored a Name the Asteroid contest in late 2020 for near-Earth asteroid 1999 AP10, also known as Asteroid 159402, which drew over 120 entries.

At Unistellars Winter Solstice Virtual Star Party on Dec. 21, 2020, the company announced Carrera, a Mexican astronomer, who died earlier that year at age 84, as the contest winner.

Her selection was celebrated in an online discussion on Jan. 13, 2021, titled Women in Astronomy, which promoted awareness of Carrera and her accomplishments and recognized the growing number of women in the field.

We hoped this asteroid would receive a name as inspiring as our accomplishment, but we never could have expected how truly fitting the winning name would be. Adas drive and astronomical accomplishments have found their match in near-Earth asteroid 1999 AP10, said Val Klavans, Unistellar Brand Ambassador at the SETI Institute.

Contest organizers plan to submit the name to the International Astronomical Union Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature for formal approval.

Carrera was a motorcyclist who started her career in astronomy when she was in her 40s. She was a powerful advocate of astronomy education in Mexico and shared her love of astronomy and space throughout Latin America and beyond, acting as a powerful inspiration for women and girls.

The online presentation focused not just on the asteroid naming but also on the increasing number of women in and entering astronomy over just the last few years.

Panelists included Nancy Wolfson of the Taksha Center for Planetary Defense; Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute, on whom the late Carl Sagan based the protagonist of his novel Contact, and Klavans.

Dr. Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute. Photo Credit: NASA Ames Research Center

They noted that in 2017, women earned 33% of bachelors degrees in astronomy and 40% of doctorates in the subject. While just 19% of astronomy faculty at universities were women in 2014, by 2016, 40% of new astronomy faculty members were women.

As of 2018, women made up just 18% of members in the International Astronomical Union (IAU), but that percent is steadily increasing among younger generations.

Nine of the 18 astronauts selected for NASAs Artemis project to return humans to the Moon are women.

Tarter, who is 77, recalled that in college, she initially studied engineering, where she was the only woman in a class of 300. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, women were not permitted to use some of the large mountaintop telescopes to conduct their research. This meant young women interested in the field had few female role models.

In contrast, today, there are more opportunities than ever before for women to pursue astronomy careers, Tarter said.

Wolfson, who has worked in several sectors of the burgeoning space industry, including planetary defense against near-Earth objects, said she always felt welcome in the field while acknowledging there is still a long way to go in terms of equal gender representation.

One obstacle faced by both genders is that in elementary schools, astronomy is taught as a set of known facts rather than as open questions.

The best piece is the questions we dont have answers to, Tarter said.

Her entry into the search for extra-terrestrial life started when she learned how to program an early computer. An astronomer who was given that program approached her questioning whether it could be used to find extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Two new, exciting subfields of astronomy are astrobiology and the study of exoplanets, she added.

Klavans noted she worked as an intern with the Cassini team at NASA analyzing propane spectra with the goal of finding new chemicals in Titans atmosphere. There, she met many women astronomers who worked on Cassini. For her own enjoyment, shetaught herself Photoshop, so she could combine Cassini images of Saturns large moon Titan to replicate the way Titan would appear to the human eye.

One entry path to astronomy is taking part in citizen science projects on a volunteer basis. The SETI Institute runs many research projects, as do other groups, such as Globe at Night and Zooniverse.

Find something eye-catching for you. Think about what you can bring to the table, Wolfson advised potential volunteers.

The panelists also encouraged those interested in astronomy to develop relationships with professional astronomers by reaching out to them and learning about the projects on which they are working.

Dont be afraid to drop an email to someone who inspires you, Tarter said.

Another way to meet specialists working on specific projects is to attend astronomical conferences. Because of COVID, most of these are now virtual. At least half are free to attend, and many need volunteers, Wolfson stated.

One such event is the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) Planetary Defense Conference in April 2021, which will be virtual and free to all.

Regardless of level of education, you always want to keep learning. We have so many digital tools where you can educate yourself. You might have one idea we didnt consider yet, Wolfson said.We need the general public, and were creating a community. Please continue educating yourselves in any way you can.

Tarter encouraged anyone interested in astronomy to look around where you live community colleges, research laboratories, and opportunities to intern and learn by doing. See if you can volunteer and become part of a group.

Video courtesy of Unistellar

Tagged: Asteroid SETI Institute STEM The Range Unistellar women

Laurel Kornfeld is an amateur astronomer and freelance writer from Highland Park, NJ, who enjoys writing about astronomy and planetary science. She studied journalism at Douglass College, Rutgers University, and earned a Graduate Certificate of Science from Swinburne Universitys Astronomy Online program. Her writings have been published online in The Atlantic, Astronomy magazines guest blog section, the UK Space Conference, the 2009 IAU General Assembly newspaper, The Space Reporter, and newsletters of various astronomy clubs. She is a member of the Cranford, NJ-based Amateur Astronomers, Inc. Especially interested in the outer solar system, Laurel gave a brief presentation at the 2008 Great Planet Debate held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, MD.

Read the original here:

Asteroid naming contest sparks discussion of women in astronomy - SpaceFlight Insider

Roughly 212 light years away in the Virgo constellation lies a super-large exoplanet that has astronomers revising their theory of how giant gas planets form.

The exoplanet, called WASP-107b, was discovered in 2017. At the time, it was difficult to accurately pinpoint its mass. But what astronomers did know is that it was already unusual.

It is a particularly large planet, roughly the size of Jupiter, but with an orbit that is just a mere ninemillion kilometres away from its host star, WASP-107, which is estimated to be about three billion years old.

To put that in perspective, Mercury, the closest planet to our sun, sits at 60 million kilometres. One year on WASP-107b takes roughly 5.7 days.

However, now, after years of observations using the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, a team of international astronomers have uncovered something else: WASP-107b is oddly light. In fact, it's much lighter than what was thought was needed to build gas giants such as Saturn and Jupiter.

"What was really surprising about this planet is that people have known that it's about the size of Jupiter, so it's a gas giant," said Eve Lee, co-author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal and an assistant professor in the department of physics at McGill University and McGill Space Institute in Montreal. "So if it's a gas giant, then the usual expectation is that it would weigh just as [much] as gas giants. Except it didn't."

Jupiter is about 300 times the mass of Earth. But WASP-107b while roughly the same size as our solar system's biggest and most massive planet is only 30 times that of Earth. That's 1/10th the mass.

The international team of astronomers inferred from their observations that the core of the planet was just four times that of Earth. But in theory, it was believed that these giant planets with such a gaseous atmosphere would require a core that was at least 10 times that of Earth's.

After a star forms, the remaining gas and dust called a protoplanetary disk come together to build planets. When it comes to the gas giants, it's believed that a core that is 10 times more massive than Earth's is required to build or accrete and hold on to the gas envelopes.

So what's the deal with WASP-107b?

Lead author Caroline Piaulet of the Universit de Montral said there are two key elementsin the theory of how this might have happened.

First, it's believed that WASP-107b formed much farther out from its current location, likely around one astronomical unit, or the average distance between the sun and Earth, roughly 150 million kilometres. There, it began to accrete gas and dust relatively quickly.

Secondly, it began to cool rather quickly.

"When it cools down efficiently, it's able to accrete efficiently because if it cools down, it's going to shrink," said Piaulet. "So it's going to have more space to accrete more gas."

Eventually, the planet migrated inward to its current position.

WASP-107b isn't the only "super puff" planet, as they are often called. Lee said there are four others known, though WASP-107b is the puffiest.

So just how puffy is it?

"It's usually compared to cotton candy, because it's about the right density," Lee said. "But it's not the kind that you find at carnivals. It's more like the kind that you buy at stores."

And, as surprising as this super-puff planet was, there was yet another surprise in store: a second planet orbiting the star, WASP-107c.

The planet was detected because of the longer observation time and was found to be roughly one-third the mass of Jupiter. Its orbit around the star takes about three years, significantly longer than WASP-107b.

The discovery is just a reminder that, while we may think we have an understanding of how planets form, we still have a lot to learn about what lies beyond our own solar system. Even then, Piaulet said, we still don't even know much about the cores of our own giant gas planets, such as Jupiter.

"What I found really exciting is that it's kind of pushing our understanding of planet formation to its limits."

Read more:

Astronomers discover huge exoplanet has the density of cotton candy - CBC.ca

Back at the dawn of the Universe, astronomers have found a stacks on of cosmic proportions. At least 21 galaxies, forming stars at a tremendous rate, are merging together in the early stages of the formation of a galaxy cluster. And it's all happening 13 billion light-years away - just 770 million years after the Big Bang itself.

This is the earliest protocluster discovered yet, named LAGER-z7OD1, and today it has probably evolved into a group of galaxies 3.7 quadrillion times the mass of the Sun.

Such a large protocluster, so early in the Universe - barely a cosmic eyeblink since the curtain was raised on life, the Universe and everything - could contain some vital clues as to how the primordial smoke cleared and the lights switched on, sending light streaming freely through space.

Our Universe is a massively interconnected place. Galaxies may seem relatively self-contained, but more than half of all galaxies are gravitationally bound together in clusters or groups, huge structures of hundreds to thousands of galaxies.

The beginnings of such clusters are not unknown in the early Universe. Protoclusters have been found nearly as far as LAGER-z7OD1, some even much bigger, suggesting that clusters could begin assembling much faster than previously thought possible.

But LAGER-z7OD1, according to a team of researchers led by astronomer Weida Hu of the University of Science and Technology of China, is special. It can reveal clues about one of the most mysterious stages in the history of the Universe: the Epoch of Reionisation.

"The total volume of the ionised bubbles generated by its member galaxies is found to be comparable to the volume of the protocluster itself, indicating that we are witnessing the merging of the individual bubbles and that the intergalactic medium within the protocluster is almost fully ionised," they wrote in their paper.

"LAGER-z7OD1 thus provides a unique natural laboratory to investigate the reionization process."

Space, you see, wasn't always the lovely, see-through place it is today. For the first 370 million years or so, it was filled with a hot murky fog of ionised gas. Light was unable to travel freely through this fog; it scattered off free electrons and that was that.

Once the Universe cooled down enough, protons and electrons started to recombine into neutral hydrogen atoms. This meant that light - not that there was much, yet - could finally travel through space.

As the first stars and galaxies began to form, their ultraviolet light reionised the neutral hydrogen ubiquitous throughout the Universe: first in localised bubbles around the ultraviolet sources, and then larger and larger areas as the ionised bubbles connected and overlapped, allowing the entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation to stream freely.

By about 1 billion years after the Big Bang, the Universe was completely reionised. This means that it's more challenging to probe beyond this point (about 12.8 light-years away), but it also means that the reionisation process itself is tricky to understand.

Ideally, you need really bright objects whose ionising radiation could cut through the neutral hydrogen, and that's what Hu and his team were looking for with the Lyman Alpha Galaxies inthe Epoch of Reionization survey. These are small, early-Universe galaxies forming stars at an insane rate, which means they can be detected at quite large distances, well inside the Epoch of Reionisation. This makes them useful probes of the period.

In their search, the researchers found LAGER-z7OD1, an overdense region of galaxies in a three-dimensional volume of space measuring 215 million by 98 million by 85 million light-years. This volume contained two distinct sub-protoclusters merging together into one larger one, with at least 21 galaxies, 16 of which have been confirmed.

The total volume of ionised space around the galaxies was slightly larger than the volume of LAGER-z7OD1.

"This demonstrates substantial overlaps between individual bubbles, indicating that the individual bubbles are in the act of merging into one or two giant bubbles," the researchers wrote.

So not only does the protocluster represent an excellent example of its kind, providing a new datapoint for studying how these structures form and emerge, as well as star formation in the early Universe, it offers a one-of-a-kind window into the formation and combination of ionised bubbles in the middle of the Epoch of Reionisation.

What insights will emerge are yet to be discovered, though. As the researchers note, that will be the work of future, more powerful telescopes that will better be able to observe the finer details of the reionisation process.

The team's research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

View post:

Astronomers Detect a Surprisingly Huge Galactic Birthplace in The Early Universe - ScienceAlert

Text Size:A- A+

Bengaluru: Astronomers using NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have observed a six-star system called TIC 168789840, also known as TYC 7037-89-1, that is around 2,000 light years away from the earth.

The astronomers have also called it the sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system. This far away system was discovered using the NASA supercomputer called Discover by extracting useful information from years of existing TESS data.

While it was difficult to distinguish the individual stars, they showed a consistent pattern of dimming and brightening through which the astronomers were able to understand that starlight was being eclipsed by other stars (and not planets) with a line of sight from earth.

The discovery and analysis of the six-star system has been reported on a pre-print (not yet peer reviewed) server arXiv. It has been accepted for publication in the journal The Astronomical Journal.

Also read:For the first time ever, astronomers are witnessing a galaxys death as its happening

The star system is the fourth known sextuple star system where six stars are gravitationally bound to each other. The most famous of these is the Castor system discovered originally in the 18th century in the Gemini constellation but identified in 1920 to be a sextuple system, and is located about 51 light years away from the earth.

There are many configurations in which six stars circle a common centre or each other. In another sextuple system, known as the ADS 9731 system, four stars circle a common point, of which two stars are actually binaries.

However, the TIC 168789840 is aligned differently. Two pairs of inner stars orbit around a common barycentre (the systems centre of mass) every 3.7 years, while the outer binary pair go around the inner four every 2,000 years. Among these, the three binary star pairs are also made of two stars that whip around each others common centre of mass.

One of the inner pair of binaries revolves around each other in 31 hours, while the other does in 38 hours. The outer binary stars revolve around each other in about 197 hours.

The inner binaries orbit too close to each other, causing any potential planet to be ejected, explained the astronomers. However, the outer binaries may host planets that could have stellar views of multiple suns and sunsets.

This is the first star system where all stars in the same system eclipse each other from our line of sight, leading the astronomers to describe the system as sextuply-eclipsing.

Astronomy is increasingly becoming reliant on machine learning and large scale data processing due to the sheer volume of information being acquired on a daily basis.

Lead authors Brian Powell, a data scientist at NASAs High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center, and Veselin Kostov, an astrophysicist at the US-based SETI Institute, designed a neural network that could identify eclipsing binary stars when combing through the TESS data.

TIC 168789840 is also the only sextuple star system in our line of sight where the stars transit or pass in front of one another. Such transits are typically observed in exoplanets, where planets move in front of a star, causing a dimming in starlight and with which scientists can deduce the size of the planet blocking the star.

The neural network studied nearly 80 million records that dealt with such dimming of starlight caused by other stars, and discovered many such multiple star super systems. TIC 168789840 was discovered in March 2020, after which amateur astronomers were made aware of the data and contributed to confirmed it through observations.

Astronomers are still not clear on how such large star systems with multiple stars were formed. One of the authors has speculated that in this system, three stars were formed first from a central cloud, after which each star was enveloped with material from the same cloud, giving them all an eventual secondary companion.

Discoveries of such star systems and observations of their behaviour can give more insight into how these systems were formed and evolve, thus improving our understanding of the universe.

Also read: Mars, Moon & a fresh pair of eyes in the sky the big space missions planned for 2021

Subscribe to our channels on YouTube & Telegram

Why news media is in crisis & How you can fix it

India needs free, fair, non-hyphenated and questioning journalism even more as it faces multiple crises.

But the news media is in a crisis of its own. There have been brutal layoffs and pay-cuts. The best of journalism is shrinking, yielding to crude prime-time spectacle.

ThePrint has the finest young reporters, columnists and editors working for it. Sustaining journalism of this quality needs smart and thinking people like you to pay for it. Whether you live in India or overseas, you can do it here.

Support Our Journalism

Read more:

Sextuply-eclipsing Astronomers discover a six-star system that eclipses one another - ThePrint

The International Astronomical Unions Office of Astronomy for Development(OAD) is pleased to announce the results of its 2020 call for proposals, with21 projects selected to receive funding in 2021. Out of the 21, eight projects are from Africa.

These projects, which will address global challenges using astronomy-related innovations, include online astronomy programmes in Indonesia and India; development of astronomy video content to be used in television lessons in Pakistan; training programmes for displaced populations in refugee camps in Algeria, Spain, Italy and Uganda; motivating and improving the welfare of prisoners in Nigeria; teaching coding using astronomical topics in Portugal, Mozambique and East Timor; mentoring and inspiring girls in primary schools in rural Kenya; and astronomy projects to celebrate indigenous culture and help students identify with their ancestral roots in Chile, Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique, So Tom and Prncipe, Angola, and Portugal.

Although the call was announced in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the OAD received an enthusiastic response from the community, with 110 applications submitted. An independent review panel selected 21 proposals, which were later approved by the OAD Steering Committee. In total, 109 944 will be granted to the funded projects.

This was the ninth annual call for proposals run by the OAD. In light of the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the OAD also ran a separate call in 2020, inviting proposals to address the immediate challenges caused by the pandemic. As a result of this additional call, a further43 projects were fundedin June 2020.

The annual call for proposals is open to anyone from anywhere in the world. The next call is expected to open in April 2021.

The eight projects from Africa funded are:

1. Astrobus, NigeriaAstroBus-Nigeria is a mobile Astronomy outreach activity carried out by organizing a march and driving a motor vehicle probably 2-3 convoy to different locations in Nigeria. The Astronomy activities include sensitization, poster/billboard activities at popular location, simple astronomy experiments and others. The project aims to stimulate astronomy education and a culture of scientific thinking in Nigeria through the use of astronomy activities. We believe this idea is an effective approach to reach out to the general public in a creative and inspiring way.

2. Astrolab Distant Training, Southern, Eastern and West African countriesTo get students involved in science studies, lab activities are a necessity, but often scarce funding limits the capacity to implement it. In that context the enquiry-based lab Astrolab was developed. It is based on the analysis of astronomical images obtained with remote telescopes to introduce students to the scientific research method by working through project development and preparation, data acquisition and treatment, analysis and conclusions.

3. Astro-prison, NigeriaThe Astro-prison project aims to use Astro-prison as an astronomical tool in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Nigerian correctional facilities. The Astro-prison project targets the eighteen (18) correctional centres in South-Eastern Nigeria. South-East Nigeria is made up of five states which include Anambra State, Enugu State, Abia State, Imo State and Ebonyi State. The Astro-prison project will adopt a cross-sectional design. The project design will utilize both qualitative and quantitative methods for analysis. The project is designed to cope with the current COVID-19 pandemic by adopting preventive World Health Organization guidelines. This project will adopt the use of English, Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba languages as major communication languages because Nigeria is multi-ethnic. The Astro-prison project targets all inmates and prison warders in the South-East region of Nigeria and the sample size per prison (n) i.e. the number of participants per prison will be determined using standard Fischers et al. (1998) formula, n = (Z^2 pq)/d^2.

4. Elimisha Msichana. Elimisha Jamii na Astronomia (EMJA), (Swahili for educate a girl, educate the entire community with astronomy) KenyaIn Kenya, although 70.4% of girls aged 15-19 years manage to achieve some sort of primary education only 4.5% complete secondary education (World Bank, 2012). Only 3.5% of women (aged 15+) have completed tertiary education (World Bank, 2015). This is due to many socio-economic challenges such as teenage pregnancies, early marriages, FGM, poverty and lack of mentorship.

EMEJA will support schoolgirls and their families in rural areas of Kenya through astronomy outreach, mentorship & inspirational programmes. EMEJA aims to; 1) engage local communities in positively tackling the above socio-economic challenges; 2) increase number of girls completing secondary education in rural areas; 3) increase numbers of girls picking Physics & STEM; 4) develop resources for often underfunded local rural day secondary schools. Astronomy is the key tool & central theme around which activities will be built.

5. Knowledge access and sharing through Cultural Astronomy in Ugandas Refugee settlements and host communities, UgandaThis project is based on introducing Astronomy to refugee settlements through student activities, teacher training workshops, public engagements, webinars on Cultural Astronomy all of which will eventually be incorporated in a mobile Astronomy Lab for replication in other regions of Uganda. Project deliverables include; introduction of Astronomy in the general sciences education, a catalogue of videos, poems & other collected information for publication & display in an Astronomy museum. This project will be implemented in the 11 refugee settlements of Uganda, Africas leading refugee host.

6. Open Astronomy Clubs for Quality Education, Gender Equality and Distribution of Telescopes, CameroonOur project idea is to open Astronomy Clubs (one in a university, one in a secondary school and one in a primary school) for quality education and gender equality, and to distribute thirty telescopes in schools across the republic ( ten in ten state Universities, ten in ten secondary schools, seven in seven secondary schools and three in three primary, nursery and pre-nursery Schools) for partnership and good Ties between us, the Astronomy Club Of Cameroon and the IAU NOC Committee with the different institutions and ministry of higher education and that of the primary education.

Our only drawback was the budget. Since Astronomy Club Of Cameroon is the only existing Astronomy Club in Cameroon, we think these initiatives will help reduce our load and easily bring Astronomy knowledge to the community.

7. OruMbya Astronomy as fuel of life: the resilience of stars in Yoruba, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous Cosmogony, Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique, So Tom and Principe, Angola and PortugalOruMbya (Orum, sky in Yorub, and Mbya, a Brazilian Guarani ethnicity) is a pilot project to celebrate Astronomy as the fuel of life, in which the stories of the stars are preserved in the resilience of people from three different continents and shared over months, through scientific-cultural activities focused on the dissemination of knowledge, promotion of social inclusion and sustainable development in the context of PLOAD.

We plan to organise five public events (once a month) at the Observatory of Valongo. Every event will comprise an organic combination of three experiences: dedicated to astronomy, African and indigenous knowledge, and art or music, which will be recorded and live broadcast. There will be webinars (roundtable discussions) where people from the different countries will share their experiences of Cultural Astronomy.

8. Pan-African School for Emerging Astronomers 2021, AfricaThe Pan-African School for Emerging Astronomers (PASEA) formally known as West African International Summer School for Young Astronomers (WAISSYA) has remained one of the flagship projects of the West African Regional Office of Astronomy for Development (WAROAD), since the first edition was initiated in the year 2013.

The school is primarily designed as an innovative short-course in astronomy for university students, an outreach program for high school students cum teachers at local universities. PASEA gives students the opportunity to develop their interest in astronomy, inspire their scientific curiosity cum enhance their practice of scientific thinking; while instructors have the opportunity of exchanging educational ideas between Africa and the rest of the world.

The other projects selected are:

The OAD has also compiled a list of recommended proposals that were approved by the reviewers but could not be funded. You can browse through them here.

The Authority on News, Data and Market Analysis for the African Space Industry.

Continue reading here:

International Astronomical Union's OAD selects eight projects from Africa to receive funding - Space in Africa

Two of our solar system's largest planets get closer and closer together just days before Christmas. Astronomer Dean Regas from the Cincinnati Observatory calls the event the "Great Conjunction.""I mean this is the astronomical event of the year for the Cincinnati area," Regas said.This is not to be confused with the story that takes the spotlight as "The" Christmas Star. "Totally different thing, but I think it gets lumped into it because it's almost Christmas time. Dec. 21 is a pretty cool date. Also, it's the solstice, so we'll be looking forward to the daylight coming back after Dec. 21," Regas said. Jupiter and Saturn will be so close you can see them both in the telescope at the same time. "You're not going to exactly see one giant mega planet. They're going to be separated. If you have good eyesight or even average eyesight, you should be able to separate the two. What I'm kind of thinking it's going to look like is Jupiter is so much brighter than Saturn, you'll see Jupiter first, and then you might see a little lump on the side of it. That lump will be Saturn," he said."I have never seen this in all my years and probably never will again so I'm not going to miss it," he said. No telescope? No worries. This will be visible without one. Look to the southwestern sky between 6 to 6:45 p.m. Dec. 20-22. They will be closest on the 21.

Two of our solar system's largest planets get closer and closer together just days before Christmas.

Astronomer Dean Regas from the Cincinnati Observatory calls the event the "Great Conjunction."

"I mean this is the astronomical event of the year for the Cincinnati area," Regas said.

This is not to be confused with the story that takes the spotlight as "The" Christmas Star.

"Totally different thing, but I think it gets lumped into it because it's almost Christmas time. Dec. 21 is a pretty cool date. Also, it's the solstice, so we'll be looking forward to the daylight coming back after Dec. 21," Regas said.

Jupiter and Saturn will be so close you can see them both in the telescope at the same time.

"You're not going to exactly see one giant mega planet. They're going to be separated. If you have good eyesight or even average eyesight, you should be able to separate the two. What I'm kind of thinking it's going to look like is Jupiter is so much brighter than Saturn, you'll see Jupiter first, and then you might see a little lump on the side of it. That lump will be Saturn," he said.

"I have never seen this in all my years and probably never will again so I'm not going to miss it," he said.

No telescope? No worries. This will be visible without one. Look to the southwestern sky between 6 to 6:45 p.m. Dec. 20-22. They will be closest on the 21.

Go here to see the original:

'Great Conjunction' brings 'astronomical event of the year' to Cincinnati's sky - WLWT Cincinnati

Every night for the past two weeks, Scott Tilley has been saying good morning to the moon as it rises above the horizon.

The 50-year-old astronomy hobbyists well-wishes are intended not for Earths shiny satellite, but for the Chinese space probeChange 5, which left Earth on Nov. 24 to collect soil samples from the moon.

Every evening since, Tilley has set up his self-built 60-centimeter radio dish a miniature version of Chinas enormousFAST telescope in his backyard on Canadas west coast to eavesdrop on the signals the probe sends back to ground control.

While most space fans have been pinned to the occasional livestreams provided by Chinas state broadcaster, China Central Television, Tilley and his fellow astronomy enthusiasts around the world are tuning in to their radio telescope setups. On Twitter, they have been taking turns monitoring Change 5 and sharing the signals theyve picked up.

Amateur astronomer Scott Tilley tracks the Change 5 mission from his van in British Columbia, Canada, Dec. 3, 2020. Courtesy of Scott Tilley

On launch day, amateur astronomers managed to pick up part of the video feed that Change 5 sent back to ground control. First, a British amateur radio operator tweeted a chunk of binary code from the probe that he had captured by aiming his dish at coordinates Tilley had calculated. Then, a hobbyist from the Czech Republic managed to decode that piece of data into a nine-second video that they described in a tweet as a solar panel of Change 5 glistening in the sun and dust floating around.

This is the first time a deep-space mission has been decoded by amateurs, as far as Im aware, Tilley tells Sixth Tone, adding that many things have to line up to capture and decode a video signal, such as the timing, gear, and skill sets.

Its quite rare that we get a mission like Change 5 where theres so much going on, Tilley says. Within two weeks, Change 5 launched from southern China, landed on the moon, dug up lunar soil, and relaunched from the moon a relative plethora of tasks.

He has tracked many other spacecraft, from NASA satellites to Chinas earlier lunar probes, and few are as busy as Change 5. Most spacecraft spend the bulk of their missions cruising, he says.

A GIF shows signals from the Change 5 ascender and orbiter, observed and recorded by Scott Tilley. Courtesy of Scott Tilley

Astronomy radio hobbyists are relatively rare in China. But at the Harbin Institute of Technology in the countrys northeast where one of Chinas few amateur radio clubs is located students have also been tuning in to the lunar mission with a radio telescope installed on campus thats about 5.4 meters in diameter.

Within minutes of Change 5 touching down on the moon, the club posted a diagram on microblogging platform Weibo of the radio signals sent from the spacecraft. Congratulations on the landing! Good luck digging up the soil, theywrote. The club declined to be interviewed when contacted by Sixth Tone, saying they dont wish to draw attention.

Some of the international amateurs are pretty outstanding, Liu Qinghui, an astronomer at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, tells Sixth Tone. Theyre familiar with the entire process, from receiving to decoding.

It helps that ordinary data from space missions, including Change 5, usually isnt encrypted, Liu says. Most of the time, its just sending a picture. If you want to encrypt the message, youre wasting resources.Because encrypted files are bigger, transmitting them takes longer, and during critical times such as moon landings, minimal communication delays are preferred.

However, signals going from ground control to the spacecraft are encrypted otherwise people could easily control and disrupt the mission, he says. To avoid communication interference, space missions must also make the frequencies they will use public.

Liu himself has taken part in spacecraft tracking, too. He participated in a collaboration between the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and the European Space Agency, a project for which they tracked ESAs Mars mission as training for ChinasTianwen-1mission to the red planet.

But Liu admires the global community of amateurs who manage to do the same from their own backyards just for the fun of it. In a research climate like Chinas, when it comes to individuals pursuing topics that might not seem particularly useful, I have to admit that sometimes these ideals are somewhat lacking, Liu says. We are still cultivating peoples interests in less tangible subjects like astronomy. But I think it will change in the future.

Editor: Kevin Schoenmakers.

(Header image: A diagrammatic illustration of the Change 5 ascender preparing to dock with the orbiter, published Dec. 6, 2020. Jin Liwang/Xinhua)

The rest is here:

Amateur Astronomers Over the Moon for Chang'e 5 Mission - Sixth Tone

Santiago, Chile In line with Microsofts recent announcements in Chile, Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, met with an ESO delegation, headed by its Director General , Xavier Barcons, to sign a new step of their agreement that addresses to optimize and enhance the science made from ESO Paranal Observatory telescopes through Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Thanks to this initiative, ESO and Microsoft will work in three areas of great interest for the operations of the Paranal Observatory. The first project is Turbulence Nowcasting, which makes real-time weather and atmospheric predictions to determine whether weather conditions are suitable for different observations. The second project is Anomaly Detection in calibration images taken with ESOs scientific instruments. The visual inspection of the images is replaced by the automatic inspection through Machine Learning algorithms. The third project is Adaptive/Predective Control on adaptive optics, a technique that allows to correct in real time the distortions caused by the turbulence of the Earths atmosphere, making the obtained images almost as sharp as those taken from space.

Microsoft will allocate resources from Microsoft Research, its research division and AI specialist, to analyze large volumes of data from Earths atmosphere. Microsoft will also donate resources from its Cloud and AI platform for the equivalent of $3 million of dollars.

ESO researchers will use these advances in the day-to-day scientific operations of ESOs Paranal Observatory. This work will be carried out by the observatorys local engineering team, in collaboration with universities and companies in Chile to enhance the use of AI at a local level. Research will include training programs to strengthen knowledge transfer in the country.

This partnership began to develop on Brad Smiths previous visit in 2019 to the ESO Paranal Observatory, located in Regin de Antofagasta, at Chiles northest.

Since Galileo pointed his telescope at the night sky more than 600 years ago, technology has propelled humankinds understanding and discovery of space, said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. Today, cloud computing and artificial intelligence continue to accelerate the work of modern-day astronomers. Were so proud to partner with the European Southern Observatory as they will explore our digital technology to optimize their telescopes to accelerate their scientists work from taking decades to days

Astronomy is also facing a digital transformation. We must adopt the concepts of Industry 4.0, an important factor to understand in the future the complexity of the operations of a revolutionary telescope such as ESOs ELT. Thanks to this alliance, we will learn to face complex problems in a state-of-the-art observatory such as Paranal. At the same time, we want to pass on what our colleagues have learned to the local community through companies and universities in Chile said Claudio Melo, ESO representative in Chile.

Both initiatives started as proofs of concept led by EY-Metric Arts, Microsoft partner in Chile, who with its team of astronomers specialized in Artificial Intelligence contributed to taking the first steps in the development of this technology.

As EY Chile, we see a great space for cloud and AI technologies to strongly impact the current astronomical operation, in order to lay the foundations for the astronomical operations of the future. We also see a huge opportunity to take advantage of these pioneering initiatives, to link local talent and test solutions that can eventually be transferred to other industries, Patricio Cofre, Partner at EY Chile

About ESO

ESO is Europes leading intergovernmental astronomical organization and the worlds most productive astronomical observatory. It has sixteen member countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Sweden and Switzerland, along with Chile, host country, and Australia as a strategic ally. ESO develops an ambitious program focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground observation facilities that allow astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays an important role in promoting and organizing cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates in Chile three unique observation facilities in the world: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope in conjunction with its VLTI (Very Large Telescope Interferometer), the worlds most advanced, as well as two tracking telescopes: VISTA (Optical and Infrared Tracking Telescope for Astronomy), which works on infrared, and the VST (VLT Survey Telescope), which tracks in visible light. ESO is also a partner of two facilities in Chajnantor, APEX and ALMA, currently the largest operating astronomical project in the world. Finally, in Cerro Armazones, near Paranal, ESO is building the 39-meter ELT (Extremely Large Telescope), which will become the largest eye in the world to look at the sky.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq MSFT @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Media contact:

IDENTIDAD CORPORATIVA

Mnica Sols / [emailprotected]

Pamela Silva / [emailprotected]

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Chile, ESO, Transforma Chile #ReactivacinDigital

Read more:

ESO and Microsoft will work with artificial intelligence to boost astronomy - News Center Latinoamrica - Microsoft

Department of Physics & Astronomy

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy

Ball State University

Ball State Universitys Department of Physics & Astronomy has a tenure-track position available August 2021. The successful applicant will be expected to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in physics, conduct and disseminate research and actively seek external funding to support this research, supervise undergraduate and graduate research projects, and participate in service activities appropriate for a tenure-track position.

Primary Responsibilities: include teaching courses ranging from non-major courses, primarily at the 100-level, to advanced undergraduate and graduate level courses. It is also assumed that the successful candidate will have the opportunity to teach courses within their area of expertise. They will be expected to conduct an active research program in experimental physics. Start-up funds will be available to initiate a research program and set up an experimental lab within the Cooper Science complex. It is expected that the successful applicant will publish 1-2 refereed journal articles per year and similar number of conference presentations in the areas of physics. These publications will usually include students as authors and co-authors.

Minimum Qualifications: Earned Ph.D. in physics or closely related field from an accredited institution, completed by date of appointment. One year minimum teaching experience at the college level, gained concurrently or at any time. Effective communication skills in both the classroom and laboratory setting.

Employer will consider sponsorship.

Preferred Qualifications: Research experience in experimental physics. Preference may be given to candidates with backgrounds in Nuclear physics, Particle physics, Semi-conductor physics, Nanophysics, or Bio/Medical Physics. Three or more years of successful post-secondary teaching experience. Record of acquisition of external grants and scholarly publications.

Apply online at: http://bsu.peopleadmin.com/postings/23154. Include the following documents with your application: curriculum vitae, Teaching Statement/Portfolio, and Research Statement/Papers, and cover letter addressed to Feng Jin. Additional materials supporting excellence in teaching and/or research may be submitted under the Other document in the optional Applicant Documents section. (Note that only one document may be uploaded. Therefore, if you desire to upload multiple documents in the Other section, you will need to combine them into a singlePDFprior to the upload.) The option to upload transcripts is available. Original, official transcripts showing the highest related degree earner is required at the time of hire (even if obtained at BSU). Degree verification will be conducted.

Review of applications will begin immediately and will be accepted through January 21, 2021.

Ball State University is located in Muncie, Indiana, approximately 45 miles northeast of Indianapolis. Approximately 21,000 undergraduate and graduate students enroll each year in diverse academic programs on and off campus. Our students come from all Indiana counties, all 50 states, and 68 countries to pursue knowledge in seven academic colleges offering 190 undergraduate majors, 130 undergraduate minors, 140 graduate programs and 200 study abroad programs.

The Ball State way is rooted in the Beneficence Pledge a commitment to excellence in teaching and scholarship, honesty and integrity, social responsibility, gratitude and valuing the intrinsic worth of each member of our community. Ball State students, faculty and staff are empowered in a culture that believes in them and demands they believe in themselves. They are partners in an innovative, immersive approach to education. They are supported by living and learning facilities that enable intellectual curiosity. We graduate scholars who are changing the world, and weve dedicated our University to do the same.

The university offers an excellent wellness program and extensive benefits offerings to include a generous paid time off package and paid parental leave. For further information regarding benefits please visit: https://cms.bsu.edu/About/AdministrativeOffices/HumanResources/Jobs/Benefits-and-Community/Faculty

Ball State University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer that is strongly and actively committed to diversity within its community. Women, minorities, individuals with disabilities and protected veterans are strongly encouraged to apply. All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status or any other legally protected status.

Visit link:

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy in Muncie, IN for Ball State University - Physics

In September 2019, my colleague Anna Kapinska gave a presentation showing interesting objects she had found while browsing our new radio astronomical data. She had started noticing very weird shapes she could not fit easily to any known type of object.

Among them, labelled by Anna as WTF?, was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke-ring. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what it was. A few days later, our colleague Emil Lenc found a second one, even more spooky than Annas.

Anna and Emil had been examining the new images from our pilot observations for the Evolutionary Map of the Universe project, made with CSIROs revolutionary new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope.

Evolutionary Map of the Universe plans to boldly probe parts of the Universe where no telescope has gone before. It can do so because Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope can survey large swathes of the sky very quickly, probing to a depth previously only reached in tiny areas of sky, and being especially sensitive to faint, diffuse objects like these.

I predicted a couple of years ago this exploration of the unknown would probably make unexpected discoveries, which I called WTFs. But none of us expected to discover something so unexpected, so quickly. Because of the enormous data volumes, I expected the discoveries would be made using machine learning. But these discoveries were made with good old-fashioned eyeballing.

Our team searched the rest of the data by eye, and we found a few more of the mysterious round blobs. We dubbed them odd radio circles, which stands for odd radio circles. But the big question, of course, is: what are they?

At first, we suspected an imaging artefact, perhaps generated by a software error. But we soon confirmed they are real, using other radio telescopes. We still have no idea how big or far away they are. They could be objects in our galaxy, perhaps a few light-years across, or they could be far away in the Universe and maybe millions of light-years across.

When we look in images taken with optical telescopes at the position of odd radio circles, we see nothing. The rings of radio emission are probably caused by clouds of electrons, but why do not we see anything in visible wavelengths of light? We dont know, but finding a puzzle like this is the dream of every astronomer.

We have ruled out several possibilities for what odd radio circles might be.

Could they be supernova remnants, the clouds of debris left behind when a star in our galaxy explodes? No. They are far from most of the stars in the Milky Way and there are too many of them.

Could they be the rings of radio emission sometimes seen in galaxies undergoing intense bursts of star formation? Again, no. We do not see any underlying galaxy that would be hosting the star formation.

Could they be the giant lobes of radio emission we see in radio galaxies, caused by jets of electrons squirting out from the environs of a supermassive black hole? Not likely, because the odd radio circles are very distinctly circular, unlike the tangled clouds we see in radio galaxies.

Could they be Einstein rings, in which radio waves from a distant galaxy are being bent into a circle by the gravitational field of a cluster of galaxies? Still no. Odd radio circles are too symmetrical, and we do not see a cluster at their centre.

In our paper about odd radio circles, which is forthcoming in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, we run through all the possibilities and conclude these enigmatic blobs do not look like anything we already know about.

So we need to explore things that might exist but have not yet been observed, such as a vast shockwave from some explosion in a distant galaxy. Such explosions may have something to do with fast radio bursts, or the neutron star and black hole collisions that generate gravitational waves.

Or perhaps they are something else entirely. Two Russian scientists have even suggested odd radio circles might be the throats of wormholes in spacetime.

From the handful we have found so far, we estimate there are about 1,000 odd radio circles in the sky. My colleague Brbel Koribalski notes the search is now on, with telescopes around the world, to find more odd radio circles and understand their cause.

It is a tricky job, because odd radio circles are very faint and difficult to find. Our team is brainstorming all these ideas and more, hoping for the eureka moment when one of us, or perhaps someone else, suddenly has the flash of inspiration that solves the puzzle.

It is an exciting time for us. Most astronomical research is aimed at refining our knowledge of the Universe, or testing theories. Very rarely do we get the challenge of stumbling across a new type of object which nobody has seen before, and trying to figure out what it is.

Is it a completely new phenomenon, or something we already know about but viewed in a weird way? And if it really is completely new, how does that change our understanding of the Universe? Watch this space!

Ray Norris is a Professor, School of Science at the Western Sydney University.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

See the rest here:

Ghostly blobs in space are the new exciting thing in astronomy. Could these be linked to wormholes? - Scroll.in

Award-winning documentary 'Hidden in the mists of Time - The Travancore Observatory', brings the forgotten research facility from the 1830s to new light

Trekking up the arduous route to the misty peak of Agastyakoodam, astrophysicist and academic Anand Narayanan, marvelled at the spirit of enquiry and adventure that motivated John Allan Broun, a British astronomer, to make the same trip more than 150 years ago.

Broun, the second director of the observatory in Thiruvananthapuram (appointed in 1852), felt that an observatory post atop the Agastyakoodam, the second highest peak in the Western Ghats in Kerala, would be the best place to carry out studies on magnetism. We were tracing his footsteps to see if we could discover the post he had set up there, says Anand, Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology.

Also Read: Get 'First Day First Show', our weekly newsletter from the world of cinema, in your inbox. You can subscribe for free here

Ever since Anand first heard about the nakshatra bungalow in the heart of Thiruvananthapuram city from local history buffs, he was intrigued and tried to learn more about its location, work and history. It still exists in the heart of the city but hardly anyone knows about its significance and the work of eminent scientists who had worked there, he says.

He began delving into the history of the observatory and read annual reports brought out by the erstwhile Travancore Administration, where they chronicle in great detail everything that happened in the kingdom during that year. All of it is preserved at the Public Library in the city.

I was able to read the report on the centenary of the observatory in 1937, where many dignitaries, like CP Ramaswamy Iyer, had gathered to celebrate the occasion. I realised that though it is a small facility, it had been through a lot of ups and downs, depending on the people at the helm, says Anand.

Wanting more people to know more about the place, he decided to make a documentary. The 27-minute short, Hidden In The Mists Of Time The Travancore Observatory, bagged awards for the best-researched film and for the best-technically visualised film (graphics, animation, and special effects) in the recently concluded 10th National Science Film Festival of India, held from November 24 - 27.

Anand began his research for the film in 2017. We realised how fascinating regional history can be. Stories of the past are always around us but hidden from us at the same time. And that is where research becomes interesting. We talked to several local historians and the older generation who were associated with the observatory one way or the other. We then spent a lot of time finding documentary evidence to verify certain facts and fill the gaps, he elaborates.

The observatory predates the University of Kerala, although it now comes under its aegis.

This is perhaps the oldest scientific facility of the University and it had been commissioned by Swati Thirunal, then the reigning monarch of erstwhile Travancore, in 1837. He was keen on astronomy and was in his twenties when he decided to have an observatory in Thiruvananthapuram. There was a certain vision in his decision, explains Anand. In 1832, Swathi Thirunal had met John Caldecott, the British commercial agent and persuaded him to set up the observatory.

To make the film, Anand approached the Department of Physics of the University of Kerala. They were extremely supportive, giving him permission for filming and for going through the archival material in the observatory. The film was financially supported by an outreach grant from the Kerala State Council for Science Technology and Education.I gathered a team of students to help with the research. Reputed wildlife photographer Suresh Elamon sir joined in as cinematographer. I had no story board or script. We began randomly shooting everything related to the observatory. Somewhere along the way, I wrote a script, he says. Rahul Rajiv, an engineer with a knack for visuals and science, did the editing, and Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan, the voiceover.

Anand and his team did the Agastyamala trek (about 69 km from the city) in January 2019, following reported geographical coordinates of the magnetic observing station. There were no tangible structures there. The reports mentioned that the structure was made of wood. It is likely to have perished in the humid, windy conditions close to the summit of the peak. We just filmed whatever was present at roughly the location mentioned there was practically nothing, he recalls.

The team consisting of Sreerag Jayakumar, Shajeer Rahman, Vivek Vijayan and Anand found the going tough even now due to the tropical vegetation and the steep climb. Academic and local history buff Achuthsankar S Nair mentions in the documentary that the team led by Broun was given convicts to help them cut a path to reach the peak.

Making the film meant digging through the history of the city. They found that the observatory was once used for timekeeping and that the Travancore Broadcasting Station depended on the observatory for accurate timekeeping.

However, one of the many reasons why this facility, in our opinion, waned out is because its focus kept shifting over time from astronomy to magnetic field studies, to timekeeping, and meteorological measurements. It depended on who was in charge of the observatory and what their science interests were. At the same time, the city grew around that facility, the light pollution increased, and it became difficult to carry out scientifically worthwhile astronomical observations, believes Anand.

He says the future of this place lies in reviving the facility into a science history museum, and an astronomy public outreach facility and thus help. . This is probably the best way to help the future generations bond with local history. The place is of national importance; it is the second oldest modern astronomical observatory in India, after the Madras Observatory, he asserts.

More:

Star gazing with astronomers of the past - The Hindu

Astrophysicist Andrea Ghez was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the supermassive black hole that lurks at the center of the Milky Way.

Ghez led a team that carefully measured the movements of stars at the center of the Milky Way, showing that these stars were revolving around something incredibly heavy. That black hole, named Sagittarius A*, is thought to have played an important role in the formation of our galaxy. She also developed a technique known as speckle imaging, which combines many short exposures from a telescope into a single, crisper image.

A professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Ghez grew up in Chicago and is a 1983 graduate of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, an N-12 school renowned for its pioneering approach to education. Last month, she gave a colloquium at the UChicago physics department explaining how to prove a black hole exists.

Ahead of the Nobel Prize award ceremony on Dec. 10, she spoke with UChicago News about her love of science, how to get back up again after running into obstacles in life, and the responsibilities that come with winning sciences top honor.

You become a spokesperson for science, she said. With being the fourth woman ever awarded in physics, theres an opportunity there to be a more visible role model. How do you want to use that opportunity to advance scienceyour science, science at large, and the opportunities for the next generation to do science. So Im still thinking a lot about that.

The full interview, edited for clarity, is below.

I love it! I think its all about what you love. You can endure a lot if you have passion for something.

Anything you do with great intensity comes with all kinds of interesting issues. In both science and life, youre going to experienceIm looking for a different word than failure, because its not really failure. Its bumps in the road. Its things not going how you planned or thought, and how to develop that ability to understand the idea that all challenges can be opportunities.

I have to say, thats become one of my favorite sayingsthat all challenges can also be opportunities. When I talk to my kids, I say that good faceplants are really important in life. You need to figure out how to get up and figure out what didnt work, and how you move forward. How do you take whatever you can learn from it, and just keep going? Because that always happens. It doesnt matter what field youre in. It doesnt matter what walk of life youre from. These things will present as challenges; how do you reposition yourself so that you can make progress?

Well, you know, the first time I proposed to do this [now Nobel-winning] experiment to get telescope time, it was turned down. To me, it was so obvious that it was such a good idea! I realized when youre trying to convince a group of people to do something that hasnt been done before, just because you think its a good idea, that doesnt mean theyre going to accept it.

So it forced me to articulate the science better. Thats the opportunity: Figure out what they didnt like and strengthen the argument.

The most interesting moments scientifically are when you talk to somebody with a really different point of view. Often you can find deeper truths, or the weaknesses in work, by having dialogues. In fact, thats why I like giving talks about my work at other universities, because you present it to different audiences and they often have something new to offer, or something you didnt think of.

Read this article:

Astronomer Andrea Ghez on the responsibility that comes with a Nobel Prize - UChicago News

For those who used to subscribe to Sports Illustrated for Kids, now would be a good time to call your parents and pray they are hoarders.

This week a mint Tiger Woods card sold for $26,400 at a Dallas auction. At least, we think thats what it sold for. On the Heritage Auctions website, the item has SOLD next to its lot, although it appears the seller might be willing to give it to you for the small sum of $34,000.

Crazy thing is the card was not technically a trading card, as it came in a sheet distributed in an issue of SI for Kids. The card was issued in 1996, Woods rookie season on the PGA Tour, in which he won twice.

Now, $26,400 for a card that came in a kids magazine may seem a tad overboard. Its just cardboard with a photo, right? Well strap in, sports fan, because the same auction house sold a rare Wayne Gretzky card for a whopping $1.29 million earlier in the week. (We mentioned you should call your parents, yes?)

Collectible cards are graded for perfections and imperfections, like how well it was preserved or how much it has deteriorated. PSA weeds out the fakes. They grade by numbers: 1 (poor) to 10 (gem mint), with the Woods card receiving a 10 score.

Woods memorabilia tends to be a hot ticket on the auction circuit. In September a replica of Woods Cameron putter sold for $150,000.

Read more from the original source:

Tiger Woods rookie card grabs an astronomical fee and it can still be yours (we think) - Golf Digest