Daily Archives: February 7, 2022

One of the girls asked Mitchell if she might enroll in the school. Raised like most Quakers to oppose slavery, Mitchell knew that recently debate had raged in Nantuckets white community about the radical notion of integrating the islands public school. Slavery had been banned in Massachusetts since the 1780s, but government, business, and education carefully kept free Black people on the lowest rung of the social ladder. When she met the girls hopeful gazes and told them yes, they could enroll, Mitchell knew that uproar might follow.

Mitchell was just 17 then, but she would go on to be the first female astronomer in the United States and one of the first in the world. Part of what Maria Mitchell did, says astrophysicist and University of New Hampshire assistant professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, was give us a model of a community-engaged astronomer. She never thought she should just shut up and calculate. Mitchell was principled in her views and not timid about sharing them. She had a sense of responsibility to the broader community, from the importance of educating Black girls during a time of intense segregation to her subsequent persistent advocacy for women in science.

Today, 133 years after her death, Mitchells legacy continues in institutions such as the Maria Mitchell Observatory on her native Nantucket, where director Regina Jorgenson conducts research on galaxy formation and directs an outreach program targeting students from underserved communities. Maria Mitchell was very much ahead of her time, Jorgenson says. Learning by doing was her foundational philosophy. While this is fairly common pedagogical practice today, it was not at all at that time.

The observatorys research program, once women-only, is now mixed-gender but still women-dominated. Which, adds Jorgenson, is extremely unusual, if not unique, in American astrophysics. One in 20 female astronomers in the country has passed through the observatory in some fashion, creating a community of women tied together by the legacy of Maria Mitchell.

White society was not torpedoed by the education of three Black girls, it turned out, and Mitchell soon moved to other fields. She did not attend college (few colleges accepted women at that time), but within a year, she was hired as librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum. Many cities boasted an athenaeum (named for Athena, the Olympian goddess of wisdom), a combination of a subscription library, nexus of important periodicals, and lecture venue. (Many, such as Nantuckets and Bostons, still flourish.) Mitchell worked there for two decades. She spent spare hours devouring books and periodicals about astronomy and mathematics, while teaching herself French and German.

William Mitchell, her father, held many jobs over the years, from clerk of the Nantucket Society of Friends to banker, schoolmaster, and legislator. He even set chronometers for whaling captains who required an accurate timepiece for determining longitude. But the constant for him and his family was astronomy.

His daughters talents in this field were recognized early. Beginning in childhood as her fathers assistant, Maria grew ever more adept as an astronomer which flowered into her great passion in life. By the age of 12 she was charting eclipses from the awkward little platform perched astride their steep roof.

When William was hired in 1836 as director of Pacific Bank, the job included a spacious penthouse apartment above the bank. Its flat slate roof made it easier for him and his daughter to build another observatory. For the next 11 years, she peered at the sky on most clear nights.

She had been precisely monitoring successive quadrants of the sky for years when, on October 1, 1847, the Mitchells hosted a party. It was a clear and cool night. After tea she said to the guests and her family, Now, you must excuse me. The heavens are so clear I want to sweep the skies. Who knows what comets may be roaming at large?

Maria donned a coat and climbed up to the roof. She peered yet again at a familiar corner of the sky but this time she saw something new. She went downstairs and told her father what she thought she had found.

Soon partygoers heard William race downstairs from the roof. With his observing cap still pulled low over his eyes, he tore open the parlor door and exclaimed, Maria has found a telescopic comet!

He wrote immediately to various authorities to establish her priority. Soon the director of the US Coast Survey was writing, We congratulate the indefatigable comet seeker most heartily on her success; is she not the first lady who has ever discovered a comet?

She was not, but it was a rare achievement nonetheless. For millennia, these visitors to the night sky had been regarded as celestial omens, and this one bode well for Maria Mitchell. Soon popularly called Miss Mitchells Comet (now designated C/1847 T1), it is not a periodic visitor to the solar system, unlike the comets Halley or Hale-Bopp.

At 30, Mitchell began to receive the scientific accolades that would continue for the rest of her life. She was the first American astronomer to discover a comet. Soon Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and later to most of the previously all-male institutions, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She became quite famous, publicly supporting feminism and abolition when it would have been easier to not do so. When Frederick Douglass first spoke to a large mixed-race audience on Nantucket in 1841, she was present, and her work was honored at the Seneca Falls Womans Rights Convention in 1848.

When Vassar College opened its doors in 1865, Mitchell was there as its first professor of astronomy (paid considerably less than her male colleagues). She was 47 and among the first generation of astronomers who were also college professors a marriage of commitments that left her exhausted.

She was hugely popular with students even revered. They helped her chart sunspots and eclipses. We are women studying together, she would say to launch a class. She objected to numerical grading but gave rigorous math tests. Astronomy is not stargazing, she insisted. The laws which govern the motions of the sun, the earth, planets, and other bodies in the universe cannot be understood and demonstrated without a solid basis of mathematical learning.

And Mitchell treated her students as serious scholars. One student wrote of her time at Vassar: I have Miss Mitchell and all these grand instruments and no one here makes fun of it at all. But when I go home no one there will take any interest in astronomy. Do you think I shall be brave enough then to hold on tight to what I have begun?

Mitchell died in 1889. In 1935, a century after she opened that school for girls, her admiring colleagues in the field named a lunar crater after her.

Thirteen years after Mitchells death, Nantucketers formed the Maria Mitchell Association to preserve her legacy as a scientist and teacher, which was meant, in part, to help female students study astronomy and hold on tight to what they began. Now the association operates two observatories, a museum at the original Mitchell home on Vestal Street where Maria and her father observed the constellations from their roof and an aquarium, providing many programs for scientists and the public.

Regina Jorgenson has been director of the Maria Mitchell Observatory since 2016. She began her career with a fellowship that enabled her to travel around the world and meet with women in astronomy to research the effect of different cultures on womens potential in science. This is a unique position for an astronomer, because it is not at an academic institute. It combines the three things I love: research, working with students, and doing public outreach.

Under Jorgensons leadership, the observatory focuses on mentoring underrepresented groups at crucial stages in their careers. Thus, the array of students and speakers is quite different than in Mitchells time. Prescod-Weinstein, who gave a lecture for the Maria Mitchell Association last July on her research into dark matter, writes about astronomy and physics within the context of her experience as a Black woman who is also agender, representing an intersection of groups that for centuries have deliberately been excluded from science.

Prescod-Weinstein says that her night sky looks very different from Maria Mitchells. Mitchell was born in 1818, before the adoption of trains, telegraphy, even photography. She could watch for comets from atop a bank in bustling downtown Nantucket. Prescod-Weinstein was born in smoggy Los Angeles, 164 years after Mitchell and after an industrial revolution accelerated climate change. My concept of the night sky was that at night it turned orange, because you were seeing the sodium lights reflected in the sky. She could scarcely see any stars.

Prescod-Weinstein is now an astrophysicist, and an assistant professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire. Her primary research is in the intersection of particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology (the science of the origin and development of the universe). She writes a monthly column, Field Notes from Spacetime, for New Scientist, and contributes columns to Physics World. And, she teaches the next generation of astronomers and physicists.

In 1835, the three little girls from the Cape Verdean community could attend teenage Marias first school, but when Mitchell became an astronomy professor at Vassar, they would not have been allowed to enroll. Prescod-Weinstein is acutely aware of the loss of stories such as theirs. Even in the worst conditions, she writes in her book, The Disordered Cosmos, Black women have looked up at the night sky and wondered. Those women whose names I do not know, who may or may not be part of my bloodline, are as much my intellectual ancestors as Isaac Newton is.

Prescod-Weinsteins mother is Barbadian and her Ashkenazi father was raised in part in Trinidad. Like Mitchell, Prescod-Weinstein celebrates her familys example. Im a third-generation teacher. Informed opposition to injustice is as natural a part of her heritage as teaching. The most recent book by her 91-year-old grandmother, Selma James, is Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet.

Published last year, The Disordered Cosmos elliptically orbits the theme of Prescod-Weinsteins research in the context of her personal experience and intellectual coming of age. It ranges from the Alice-in-Wonderland contradictions of quantum mechanics to exploring how a dominant culture controls the naming of new concepts about nature and science to worrying about the dangers of an infamously colonialist culture carrying flags to the moon and Mars.

You know, Prescod-Weinstein says, you come to college in Boston, you go to a place like Harvard, and you hear about people like Maria Mitchell because theyre considered the great historical figures of the Boston-metro area. Its interesting which stories people choose to emphasize and choose to not emphasize. And that story about Mitchell refusing to segregate her school? That is not one I was told while I was in college. It wasnt considered worth remembering.

Author Rebecca Solnit wrote that stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell. The century and a half of womens struggles in science since Maria Mitchell has resulted in new constellations of astronomers gazing at the sky. With her work on comets and sunspots, as well as her unconventional teaching methods, Mitchell created a model for an alternate intellectual genealogy in the field of astronomy. Aware of the many women of color excluded from this genealogy, Prescod-Weinstein also divides her time between studying the sky and critiquing science and society. Like Mitchell, Prescod-Weinstein sees adding new observers as a way of changing science itself. Creating room for Black children to freely love particle physics and cosmology, she writes in her book, means radically changing society and the role of physicists within it.

Michael Sims is writing a book about the young Frederick Douglass. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to Maria Mitchells first students having a Caribbean background, when the historical record only supports a probable African heritage.

Link:

She was a Quaker and self-taught astronomer with a radical idea: The stars belong to us all - The Boston Globe

The human eye is an amazing piece of equipment. It's so useful it likely evolved dozens of time independently as my friend Julia Sweeney says (paraphrased), "What good is half an eye? Probably about half as good as an eye." and allows us a way to sense the world and Universe around us with decent precision.

But... it's only sensitive to a very narrow range of light. It took a long time for humans to figure this out, but what we call visible light is only thin slice of the kind of light that's out there. Gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves... these are all forms of light with wavelengths too short or too long for the human eye to register.

If we only look to the heavens so see the visible light it sends us, we're missing out on well over 99.9% of what's out there.

Radio and millimeter waves are profoundly important things to be able to detect. So many objects emit them, from the Sun and planets to dust clouds forming stars and electrons whizzing around magnetic field lines around black holes and supernovae. By studying this form of light we get much more information about the Universe, and keen insight into the engines that drive it.

Every year there are incredible new discoveries made because astronomers and engineers built the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the immense Greenbank Radio Telescope, the Very Large Array, and more; huge dishes or multiple combined dishes to scan the sky and, well, see what we can see, even if we can't see them per se.

So it was my pleasure to work with my friends at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) to present some amazing long-wavelength astronomical highlights from 2021. We combed through the year's research, found eight wonderful stories, and I wrote and did the voice-over for beautiful animations that NRAO created to explain these phenomena. Fasten your seatbelts! We're going to travel from the nearest astronomical object in the Universe out to its most distant reaches.

Radio telescopes don't just receive long-wavelength light from objects; some can transmit it to bounce off nearby solar system bodies like the Moon. This technique, called synthetic aperture radar, can be used to map the Moon to an incredible resolution of just 5 meters. The initial tests have been so successful that NRAO received a multi-million dollar NSF grant to expand its efforts.

Our Milky Way galaxy is actively making stars, and many galaxies we see are fecund indeed. But others appear to have their star formation being quenched, where star birth is suppressed or even stagnant. To learn why, astronomers turned to ALMA to find out.

The nearby galaxy M87 has an enormous central supermassive black hole, famous for posing for the first ever high-resolution image of such a beast, which is blasting out a powerful beam of matter and energy that stretches for thousands of light years. Detailed observations using the Very Large Array show that along some its length the jet is actually a pair of entwined corkscrew spirals, a double helix much like DNA.

We see stars in the process of formation in nearby gas clouds with quite a bit of detail, but finding massive stars ones with many times the mass of the Sun in the throes of formation is more difficult. However, looking at the nebula W51, astronomers found three such monsters being created, helping them understand what's different for them than for more modest stars.

One of the more amazing recent advances in astronomy is being able to see planets forming around other stars in huge swirling disks of gas and dust. Elias-2-27 is nearby still-forming star where a massive planet is also collecting itself. ALMA observations show the chaos that such an event sows.

This is one of my favorites stories from 2021: A star went supernova in a galaxy 500 million light years from Earth. Routine, right? Yeah, well, they also found evidence that the reason this supernova occurred is because a black hole collided with the star, fell to the center, and made such a mess in the star's core that it exploded. Holy wow!

How do stars in our galaxy form? In a huge survey of the sky, astronomers used the Very Large Array to map hydrogen gas, as well as complex molecules like methanol and formaldehyde, and saw star factories churning them out, as well as the expanding debris from stars that exploded long ago.

In 2021, a type of active galaxy called a quasar was found so far away its light took over 13 billion years to reach us a distance record. At its heart is a huge black hole powering its energetic emission... which is actually a problem, since we're not sure how it could've grown to such a large size so quickly after the formation of the Universe itself.

Pretty cool, the things we can do when we open our eyes past what our eyes alone can see! And if you think these are nifty, then check out the lists we did for 2020 and for 2019.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Virginia working toward my degree, we would often walk up the street to the NRAO HQ to attend talks by local and visiting radio astronomers (and also to play volleyball, since they had a great court there). It was a lot of fun to listen to people talk about their observations using instruments totally different than what I used, and to hear about new discoveries as they happened. It is a huge honor and pleasure to be able to work with NRAO now to create these annual highlights. I hope you like them too.

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8 highlights of radio astronomy in 2021 - Syfy

7 February 2022 10:00 (UTC+04:00)

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By Ayya Lmahamad

A little bit more than a year has passed since the liberation of Azerbaijani territories from Armenian occupation. Large-scale rehabilitation and construction work is underway on these lands.

In one of hisinterviews, President Ilham Aliyev said that we will have to build, equip an area equal to the territory of a country that is not the smallest in the world - Lebanon.

Azerbaijan started to restore and rehabilitate its lands immediately after the end of hostilities.

In 2021, Azerbaijan allocated $1.5 billion for the reconstruction of liberated territories, followed by AZN 2.2 billion ($1.2 billion) in 2022. These funds will be used primarily to restore infrastructure (electricity, gas, water, communications, roads, education, health, and so on) as well as cultural and historical monuments.

Astronomical station in Karabakh

Within a short period of time, Azerbaijan reconstructed the major infrastructure facilities on its liberated lands. Among them are the construction and opening ofFuzuli International Airport, the smart city project, that is already under completion inZangilan region, the construction and rehabilitation of various substations, roads, etc.

Executive Director of the ShamakhiAstrophysical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences Professor Nariman Ismayilov recently stated that a new astronomical station will be built in the countrys Karabakh region in the near future.

He noted that the management of the National Academy of Science supported the proposal to build a new astronomical station in the Karabakh region, install modern robotic telescopes, create a central space testing site on the territory of the observatory to study the Earth through satellite observations.

This work will be an important step in the transformation of the ShamakhiAstrophysical Observatory into an international scientific center to explore the near and far space.

Astronomy in Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan has contributed to the development of science in the world, particularly so in astronomy. The country has got a real astronomical heritage, thanks to the presence in the 13 century of the famous Maragha Observatory in South Azerbaijan (now northwestern Iran) established by Azerbaijani astronomer Nasiraddin Tusi.

The development of national astronomy in the last century can be described through three stages.

The first stage covers the period of 1927-1991 and includes such events as the first astronomical expeditions and the establishment of the ShamakhiAstrophysical Observatory.

The Observatory was established in 1960 on the basis of the Astrophysics Sector of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijani SSR and its Shamakhi Astronomical Station (Pirgulu). It is considered as one of the large scientific centers for favorable astroclimatic conditions, equipped with telescopes and scientific equipment.

The second stage covers the period of 1992-1997 and is characterized as a "stagnation period"in the history of national astronomy [due to the collapse of the former Soviet Union, national and political instabilities in the newly independent country in its transition period, Armenian intervention, etc].

A new stage began in the second half of 997 with repairing, renovation, and reorganization work in the observatory and in astronomical activity in general.

Currently, astronomical research in Azerbaijan is conducted mainly in the ShamakhiAstrophysical Observatory and partially in relevant departments of several universities in Baku and in other organizations. There are three main scientific trends at the observatory - the physics of stars and nebulae, investigation of solar system bodies, and solar physics.

Azerbaijan has almost all of the attributes required for astronomy. The main contribution comes from the ShamakhiAstrophysical Observatory, which has headquarters and two high-mountain astronomical stations with favorable geographical locations. There is also a good astro-climate. Another significant fact is the mandatory teaching of astronomy as a separate subject in all higher-secondary schools, lyceums, as well as the teaching of astronomy and the fundamentals of space science in many university departments.

Additionally, Azerbaijani astronomers are actively involved in the works of some international organizations aiming at enhancing the participation of youth in astronomical and space activities and education.

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Ayya Lmahamadis AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter:@AyyaLmahamad

Follow us on Twitter@AzerNewsAz

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Azerbaijan to build astronomical station in liberated Karabakh - AzerNews