Category Archives: Astronomy

EAC Photo: Eastern Arizona Colleges Discovery Park Campus was honored to share an afternoon of astronomy-based lessons with the Natural Resource Youth Practicum Camp last week. The camp, titled Nowhi ni nlt eego anlsih in Apache, is designed to provide a study of scientific principles and cultural heritage (with perspectives of today), to help mold youth into future leaders.

Contributed Article/Courtesy EAC

ThatcherEastern Arizona Colleges Discovery Park Campus was honored to share an afternoon of astronomy-based lessons with the Natural Resource Youth Practicum Camp last week. The camp, titled Nowhi ni nlt eego anlsih in Apache, is designed to provide a study of scientific principles and cultural heritage (with perspectives of today), to help mold youth into future leaders.

The astronomy lessons shared during the visit included learning about the 20 Tinsley Telescope in the Gov Aker Observatory with guest instructor, John Ratje, retired director of the Mt. Graham International Observatory, member of the Desert SkyGazers Astronomy Club, and telescope operator for the EAC Discovery Park Campus.

Students also viewed an educational video about the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) the largest and most powerful telescope in the world (located at the Mt. Graham International Observatory on Mt. Graham) and talked about what is in the night skies: stars, planets, and galaxies, with EAC Discovery Park Campus director, Paul Anger.

The final activity included a ride on the Discovery Park Space Shuttle simulator Polaris, operated by Discovery Park Campus secretary, Monica Clarine, where the students were able to virtually visit many of the known planets and moons in our solar system.

These boys and girls were a pleasure to work with, said Anger. They were excited to learn about the hidden world of space and astronomy and had a lot of great questions. We look forward to participating in the Natural Resource Youth Practicum Camps in the future!

For more information on the activities available at EACs Discovery Park Campus, or tour information for the telescopes at the Mount Graham International Observatory, contact EACs Discovery Park Campus at (928) 428-6260 or emaildiscoverypark@eac.edu, or go towww.eac.edu/discoverypark.

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EAC's Discovery Park Campus hosts members of the 2022 San Carlos Nowhi ni' nlt eego anlsih Take Care of Our Land Natural Resource Youth Practicum Camp...

The teams identification of iso-propanol in space was made possible through observations of a particular star-forming region in our galaxy where many molecules have already been detected. Sagittarius B2 is located close to the center of our galaxy and is the target of an extended investigation of its chemical composition with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope in Chile. Microwave-wavelength emission from molecules floating around in Sgr B2 provides spectral patterns that can be recognized back on Earth, but these patterns can be weak and difficult to distinguish from each other. ALMAs introduction 10 years ago has made it possible to go beyond what could be achieved with earlier, single-dish telescope technology.

So far, the teams ALMA observations have led to the identification of three new organic molecules (iso-propyl cyanide, N-methylformamide, urea) since 2014. The ALMA projects latest result is now the detection of propanol (C3H7OH).

Our group began to investigate the chemical composition of Sgr B2 more than 15 years ago, said Arnaud Belloche from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, the lead author of the detection paper. These observations were successful and led in particular to the first interstellar detection of several organic molecules, among many other results.

Propanol is an alcohol and is the largest in this class of molecule to be detected in interstellar space. It exists in two forms (isomers), depending on which carbon atom the hydroxyl functional group is attached to: 1) normal propanol, with OH bound to a terminal carbon atom of the chain, and 2) iso-propanol, with the hydroxyl bound to the central carbon atom in the chain. Both isomers of propanol in Sgr B2 were identified in the teams ALMA data set; the first interstellar detection of normal propanol was obtained shortly before the ALMA detection by a Spanish research team with single-dish radio telescopes in a molecular cloud not far from Sgr B2. The detection of iso-propanol toward Sgr B2, however, was only possible with ALMA.

This research is part of a long-standing effort to probe the chemical composition of sites in Sgr B2 where new stars are being formed and understand the chemical processes at work during star formation. The goal is to determine the chemical composition of the star-forming sites, and possibly identify new interstellar molecules. Many of these molecules are formed on the surfaces of microscopic dust grains, where they remain until dust temperatures are high enough to release them.

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UVA Astrochemist Helps Explore the Chemistry of Outer Space - UVA Today

The asteroid Bennu has natural armor against small meteorite impacts: Its covered in Styrofoam-like rubble.

Thats the conclusion drawn by a team of scientists looking at (101955) Bennu, a wee 500-meter-wide near-Earth asteroid that was visited by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from 2018 to 2021. Bennu is a rubble pile asteroid; its not a solid monolithic piece of rock but instead a more like a collection of millions of small rocks all held together by their own mutual gravity.

Its thought that rubble pile asteroids may have once been more solid, but when an asteroid chunk gets hit by another asteroid it can shatter into a myriad of pieces which then recollect into the loosely held aggregation. The gravity of a small asteroid like Bennu is incredibly weak youd weigh a fraction of an ounce standing on its surface but its enough to hold it together.

The astronomers looking into Bennu investigated images taken by OSIRIS-REx to look at craters. Impact craters can tell you a lot about an object. In general there are few really big ones, more medium-sized ones, and countless small ones. Thats true, at least, for big, solid objects like planets and moons.

They looked at a total of 1,560 craters on Bennu, and found something very interesting [link to paper]. It does have a few big craters and more medium ones. But then it pulls a switch: There are actually very few small ones. The size distribution of craters turns over around 2-3 meters; in other words the number of them increases as the craters get smaller until they reach a size below 2-3 meters, where they actually become fewer in number.

Why?

Rocks!

The surface of Bennu is covered in, well, rubble. These rocks can be very small, up to boulders many meters across. Importantly, despite looking like the detritus left after a construction project, the rocks on Bennu are not like those on Earth. Theyre very porous and friable crumbly. So much so that the big boulders seen precariously balanced on the surface of the asteroid might collapse under their own weight here on Earth.

For example, OSIRIS-Rex touched down briefly on the surface of Bennu to collect samples. Despite moving at a leisurely 10 centimeters per second normal walking speed is 10 times faster the spacecraft still crushed a 20-cm rock sitting on the surface, showing that the rock was held together basically by a whisper.

Youd think that something that would be crushed by a kitten sitting on it would make terrible armor, but in fact the opposite is true. Small rocks moving through space at high speed make craters when they hit a solid surface as the huge kinetic energy (the energy of motion) is converted into mechanical energy, displacing and ejecting the surface material and digging out a crater. But if the surface is made of crunchy rocks, a lot of the impactors energy goes into crushing those rocks instead of displacing the material to make a crater.

This has major implications both for the science of asteroids and the important task of moving one out of the way should it be headed for Earth. In the latter case, one idea is simply smacking the asteroid hard with a massive space probe, so that the momentum of the probe pushes the asteroid onto a different trajectory. This is the reasoning behind the DART mission, which in October of 2022 will impact the small moon Dimorphos of the slightly larger asteroid Didymos and change its orbit very slightly.

But if the target asteroid is a rubble pile, a lot of the impact energy will go into crushing and shuffling around the surface material instead of moving the asteroid out of the way. So understanding how they behave under impact could actually save the world.

And the science is cool too. For example, looking at the distributions of craters sizes on an asteroid and knowing how much junk is put there in space that can hit it, you can estimate the age of the surface. Over time small craters get erased by smaller impacts, while big ones can last much longer. For Bennu, the scientists estimate craters bigger than 100 meters across can survive for 10 65 million years before being eroded away, while small ones a few meters across can last only a couple of million years tops. It was thought previously those numbers were about 15 times higher, but Bennus natural crumbly armor means the erosion happens much more rapidly.

Like Earth, the surface of Bennu is much younger than the asteroid itself, changing on a cosmically rapid timescale. Its an important step in understanding how asteroids change over time. Beauty may only be skin deep, but on asteroids that skin can make you look way younger than you really are.

There may be more practical benefits to this knowledge, too. Covering a spaceship with porous rubble may not be cost-effective, but a friable layer of material under the ships skin could protect it from smaller micrometeorites. Such a layer has been used in spacesuits for decades. Seeing it in action in a natural environment could give future engineers ideas for upgrades.

And if we do spot a rubble pile on its way toward Earth, there are other ideas besides whacking it you may be dismayed that using a nuke is a good option, though maybe not for the reason you think. Point being that the more we study these asteroids the more likely we can learn how to prevent them from ruining our day and learn some way cool science in the meantime.

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When white dwarfs go wild, their planets suffer through the resulting chaos. The evidence shows up later in and around the dying stars atmosphere after it gobbles up planetary and cometary debris. Thats the conclusion a team of UCLA astronomers came to after studying the nearby white dwarf G238-44 in great detail. They found a case of cosmic cannibalism at this dying star, which lies about 86 light-years from Earth.

If that star were in the place of our Sun, it would ingest the remains of planets, asteroids, and comets out to the Kuiper Belt. That expansive buffet makes this stellar cannibalism act one of the most widespread ever seen.

We have never seen both of these kinds of objects accreting onto a white dwarf at the same time, said lead researcher Ted Johnson, a physics and astronomy graduate of UCLA. By studying these white dwarfs, we hope to gain a better understanding of planetary systems that are still intact.

Johnson was part of a team from UCLA, UC San Diego, and the University of Kiel in Germany working to study chemical elements detected in and around the white dwarf atmosphere. They used data from NASAs retired Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, the Keck Observatorys High-Resolution Echelle Spectrometer in Hawaii, and the Hubble Space Telescopes Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. The team found and measured the presence of nitrogen, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, and iron, as well as other elements.

The iron is particularly interesting since it makes up the cores of rocky planets like Earth or Mars. Its presence is a clue that terrestrial-type worlds once orbited G238-44. The presence of high amounts of nitrogen implies the system had a pool of icy bodies as well.

As stars like the Sun enter very old age, they leave behind burned-out cores called white dwarfs. Over billions of years, these remnants of dying stars slowly cool down. Before they get to that point, however, the actual death throes can be quite violent and messy. Thats when they cannibalize the worlds around them. The discovery of the leftovers of those planets, comets, and asteroids, in the atmosphere of G238-44 paints an ominous picture of our solar systems future.

We can expect our Sun to go through the process starting in about five billion years. First, it will balloon out to become a red giant, swallowing up planets possibly out to the orbit of Earth. Then, it will lose its outer layers, forming what we call a planetary nebula. Once all thats dissipated to space, whats left is the massive, but tiny white dwarf.

The whole process will tear apart the solar system, ripping planets to shreds and scattering comets and asteroids. Any of those objects that come too close to the white dwarf Sun will get sucked in and destroyed. The scale of the destruction occurs fairly quickly if G238-44s example is any clue. This study shows the shocking scale of the chaos. Within 100 million years after it entered its white dwarf phase, the dying star was able to capture and consume material from its nearby asteroid belt and its far-flung Kuiper beltlike regions.

Not only does this finding show whats in our future, but it also supplies interesting insight into how other systems form. It offers clues to what they contain, and a peek at our own solar systems past. For example, astronomers think that icy objects crashed into dry, rocky planets in our own infant solar system. Thats in addition to the rocky materials that helped create our planet. For G238-44, that means an interesting amalgamation of stuff from a variety of regions and the evidence shows it.

The best fit for our data was a nearly two-to-one mix of Mercury-like material and comet-like material, which is made up of ice and dust, Johnson said. Iron metal and nitrogen ice each suggest wildly different conditions of planetary formation. There is no known solar system object with so much of both.

The death of this sun-like star and its penchant for gobbling up debris has another interesting twist. Billions of years ago, comets and asteroids likely delivered water to our planet, sparking the conditions necessary for life. According to Benjamin Zuckerman, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, the combo of icy and rocky material detected raining onto G238-44 shows that other planetary systems may have icy reservoirs (like the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud). Thats in addition to rocky bodies such as Earth and the asteroids.

Life as we know it requires a rocky planet covered with a variety of volatile elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, Zuckerman said. The abundances of the elements we see on this white dwarf appear to have come from both a rocky parent body and a volatile-rich parent bodythe first example weve found among studies of hundreds of white dwarfs.

Its intriguing to think that our own Sun could be doing the same thing in a few billion years. Perhaps some future astronomer on a planet a few dozen light-years away will do the same study that Johnson and his team didand spot the remains of Earth in the white dwarf Suns dying glow.

Dead Stars Cannibalism of its Planetary System is the Most Far-Reaching Ever Witnessed

Dead Star Caught Ripping Up Planetary System

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A Dying Star's Last Act was to Destroy all Its Planets - Universe Today

Untangling the evolution of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is a challenge similar to mapping the human genome, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). ESA's galaxy mapper, Gaia, takes trillions of measurements of 2 billion of the brightest stars in the sky. Here, we look at what it takes to unpick those measurements to reveal the galaxy's secrets.

On June 13, the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), a collaboration of 450 European astronomers and engineers supporting the galaxy-mapping endeavor, released what DPAC chair Anthony Brown described as "the richest set of astronomical data ever published."

To create the 10-terabyte catalog of compressed data, DPAC computers had to ingest 940 billion observations of 2 billion of the brightest light sources in the sky, Brown, an astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said at an ESA news conference on June 13.

Related: New trove of Gaia data will uncloak the Milky Way's dark past and future

The data, captured by Gaia between June 2014 and June 2017, contained information about 1.5 billion stars' precise positions and motions in the sky; details about the ages, temperatures and brightness levels of about half a billion of those stars; and detailed chemical compositions of several million of them.

It took five years for the data to pass through the sophisticated computational pipeline of validation, calibration and analysis procedures, which involve six supercomputing centers in six European countries. It would take a thousand years for a single (and rather powerful) personal computer to process the data set, Gonzalo Gracia, DPAC project coordinator for data processing, told Space.com.

As of 2022, the main Gaia database contains 1 petabyte of data, Gracia added, which is equivalent to the data capacity of 200,000 DVDs. To date, the telescope has made over 100 measurements of every single one of the 2 billion light sources it sees.

"Every day, Gaia sends us between 20 and 100 gigabytes of data," Gracia said. "That might not seem like that much if you compare it to the bandwidth you have at home, but we are talking about a satellite that is 1.5 million kilometers [930,000 miles] away from Earth."

From Gaia's vantage point at Lagrange Point 2, a stable point in the sun-Earth system where the gravitational pulls of the two bodies are in balance, the spacecraft observes the cosmos while shielded from the sun's glare.

Three ESA deep-space antennas (one each near Madrid; Malarge, Argentina; and New Norcia, Australia) receive the data collected by the space probe's two telescopes and other instruments. From those ground stations, the measurements travel on conventional internet lines to the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, for basic checks, before the data are sent to the agency's Science Operations Center in Madrid.

"This is when we do the first round of processing," Gracia said. "We do some initial calibrations and run the data through a piece of software to assess the health of the satellite. This happens in the first hours after the data is received."

Then, things start to get complicated. A data-processing center at CNES, the French space agency, in Toulouse scans the data set for fast-moving objects in the solar system: asteroids and comets that might be on a collision course with Earth.

"They have a pipeline, which detects those objects and checks whether they are already known," Gracia said. "If they are not known, they raise an alarm with the solar system objects community in the world, who can do the follow-up observation and find what the object is about and what is its trajectory."

Gaia is quite efficient in monitoring asteroids and might even be able to see some that are not visible from Earth. The mission's June 13 data release contained information about detailed trajectories of 60,000 solar system space rocks. On top of that, Gaia measured light spectra of these space rocks, revealing their chemical compositions. Previously, astronomers knew detailed chemical compositions of only 4,500 asteroids.

Separately, a team in Cambridge, England, compares new brightness measurements delivered by Gaia with data acquired earlier. Significant changes in brightness levels of stars are always a reason for excitement, as they might indicate supernovas, explosions that occur when massive stars die before collapsing into black holes or neutron stars.

Sometimes, dim distant stars and galaxies can temporarily lighten up through microlensing, an odd phenomenon that happens when an extremely massive object comes between the dim star and the observer, its powerful light-bending gravity acting as a magnifying glass. Gaia, which completes a scan of the entire sky every two months, sees all that.

In the meantime, the rest of the consortium conducts what Gracia calls "cyclic processing": endless rounds of redigesting, validating and analyzing the data to extract the most accurate information that astronomers can use to create precise maps of the Milky Way galaxy and model its life into the past and future. Several thousand servers running tens of thousands of core processors are involved in the operation.

"We have to process the data several times," Gracia said. "We process it, we give it to the scientists for checks, and then we have to tune our calibrations, our algorithms; we have to improve them every time."

The data sets are also dependent on each other. For example, without information about precise positions of the observed objects, the data on brightness changes or movements of asteroids would be worthless.

"We essentially have the information about the amount of photons hitting the Gaia telescopes, and from their position in the window, we derive the positions in the sky," Gracia said. "This is done in Barcelona, where we produce this astrometric information for all the sources in the sky. This is the input for basically all the other processing that we do. It takes a lot of time to do all that and to do it with a sufficient amount of data to ensure that the data is really of the best quality."

This amount of processing is the reason behind the delay between the acquisition of the data and its release. Gaia launched in December 2013, but the astronomical community didn't get their hands on the first batch of data until September 2016. The second data release followed in April 2018. The June 13 data dump was preceded by a partial early release in December 2020. Each new catalog increases the precision of the data as well as the amount of available information about each of the 2 billion light sources the telescope sees. Although the mission is already in its ninth year, there is no stopping for the 450 researchers and engineers at DPAC.

While the world's Milky Way researchers are unpacking the gifts of the June 13 data release, looking for evidence of the galaxy's dynamic life, Gracia and his colleagues are already busy working on the next data dump, which promises, among other things, to unleash Gaia's potential to spot planets around faraway stars. Thousands of new finds are expected to enrich the existing exoplanet catalog as the DPAC researchers train their algorithms to spot the characteristic mild dimming of a star caused by a planet crossing in front of its disk.

"We started processing data for the fourth cycle two years ago and are already planning the fifth cycle," Gracia said. "It's really nonstop."

Follow Tereza Pultarova on Twitter @TerezaPultarova. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Untangling the Milky Way's evolution through big-data astronomy - Space.com

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

Kshitij Aggarwal (opens in new tab), Affiliate Researcher in Astronomy and Astrophysics, West Virginia University

A newly discovered fast radio burst has some unique properties that are simultaneously giving astronomers important clues into what may cause these mysterious astronomical phenomena while also calling into question one of the few things scientists thought they knew about these powerful flares, as my colleagues and I describe in anew study (opens in new tab)in Nature on June 8, 2022.

Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are extremely bright pulses of radio waves that come from faraway galaxies. They release as much energy in a millisecond asthe sun does over many days (opens in new tab). Researchers here at West Virginia Universitydetected the first FRB back in 2007 (opens in new tab). In the past 15 years, astronomers have detected around 800 FRBs, withmore being discovered every day (opens in new tab).

Related: 'Weird signal' hails from the Milky Way. What's causing it?

When a telescope captures an FRB, one of the most important features researchers look at is something called dispersion. Dispersion is basically a measure of how stretched out an FRB is when it reaches Earth.

The plasma that lies between stars and galaxies causes all light including radio waves to slow down, but lower frequencies feel this effect more strongly and slow down more than higher frequencies. FRBs contain a range of frequencies, so the higher frequency light in the burst hits Earth before the lower frequencies, causing the dispersion. This allows researchers touse dispersion to estimate how far from Earth an FRB originated (opens in new tab). The more stretched out an FRB is, the more plasma the signal must have passed through, the farther away the source must be.

The new FRB my colleagues and I discoveredis named FRB190520 (opens in new tab). We found it using theFive-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (opens in new tab)in China. An immediately apparent interesting thing about FRB190520 was that it is one of the only 24 repeating FRBs and repeats much more frequently than others producing 75 bursts over a span of six months in 2020.

Our team then used theVery Large Array (opens in new tab), a radio telescope in New Mexico, to further study this FRB and successfully pinpointed the location of its source a dwarf galaxy roughly 3 billion light years from Earth. It was then that we started to realize how truly unique and important this FRB is.

First, we found thatthere is a persistent, though much fainter, radio signal being emitted (opens in new tab)by something from the same place that FRB190520 came from. Of the more than800 FRBs discovered to date (opens in new tab), only one other has a similar persistent radio signal.

Second, since we were able to pinpoint that the FRB came from a dwarf galaxy, we were able to determine exactly how far away that galaxy is from Earth. But this result didn't make sense. Much to our surprise, the distance estimate we made using the dispersion of the FRB was 30 billion light years from Earth,a distance 10 times larger than the actual 3 billion light years to the galaxy (opens in new tab).

Astronomers have only been able to pinpoint the exact location and therefore distance from Earth of 19 other FRB sources (opens in new tab). For the rest of the roughly 800 known FRBs, astronomers have to rely on dispersion alone to estimate their distance from Earth. For the other 19 FRBs with known locations, the distances estimated from dispersion are very similar to the real distances to their source galaxies. But this new FRB shows that estimates using dispersion can sometimes be incorrect and throws many assumptions out the window.

Astronomers in thisnew field (opens in new tab)still don't knowwhat exactly produces FRBs (opens in new tab), so every new discovery or piece of information is important.

Our new discovery raises specific questions, including whether persistent radio signals are common, what conditions produce them and whether the same phenomenon that produces FRBs is responsible for emitting the persistent radio signal.

And a huge mystery is why the dispersion of FRB190520 was so much greater than it should be. Was it due to something near the FRB? Was it related to the persistent radio source? Does it have to do with the matter in the galaxy where this FRB comes from? All of these questions are unanswered.

My colleagues are going to focus in on studying FRB190520 using a host of different telescopes around the world. By studying the FRB, its galaxy and the space environment surrounding its source, we are hoping to find answers to many of the mysteries it revealed.

More answers will come from other FRB discoveries in the coming years, too. The more FRBs astronomers catalog, the greater the chances of discovering FRBs with interesting properties that can help complete the puzzle of these fascinating astronomical phenomena.

This article is republished fromThe Conversation (opens in new tab)under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article (opens in new tab).

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.

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Newly discovered fast radio burst challenges what astronomers know - Space.com

Canadian astrophysicist Louise Edwards is used to answering some of the universe's toughest questions. Butat the momentshe's trying to answer this one: How many Canadian Black astronomers does she know?

Edwards, an associate professor inCalifornia Polytechnic State University's physics department, is on a Zoom call with CBCwhile sitting in a friend's brightly lit shed near her home inBerkeley, Calif.

Mulling the question, sheturns her headto the right, facing white wood-panelled walls. She's thinking hard.

"Ummm," she says, looking off into the distance. "There are definitely a few new grad students that I know of."

She pauses and smiles. "I know some physicists. And some education astronomy folks."

It's clear she's struggling.

"Yeah, there's very few," Edwards finally says. "I don't know if there's any other folks who are currently working not as students [but] as astronomers who are Canadian. I don't know. I would imagine I would know them."

Canada hassome of the world's most talented astronomers, astrophysicists and physicists. There's Victoria Kaspi, whose work on pulsars and neutron stars earned her the Gerhard Herzberg Canada gold medal for science and engineering; Sara Seager, a world-renowned astronomer and planetary scientist at MIT who earned a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2013 and is a leader in exoplanet research; and James Peebles, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in physics.

One thing they have in common? They're all white.

Black astronomers are few and far between in North America,but especially in Canada.Inside the community, members sharestories of discrimination, micro-aggressionsand feelings of isolation, which can ultimately dissuade others from pursuing careers in the sciences.

Monday marked the beginning of Black in Astro Week, which was created in June 2020 by Ashley Walker, a Black astrochemist from Chicago. Its goal? To use social media and hashtags to elevate the voices of Black scientists working in various astronomical fields.

The annual event was bornfrom an incident in May 2020 in New York's Central Park. Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher, asked a woman who was white to leash her dog. Instead, she called police, falsely accusing Cooperof harassing her. It was the same day George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.

Soon after the Central Park incident, a social media movement started on Twitter with #Blackbirders. The goal wasto increase recognition of Black people who like birding and to call attention to the harassment they often receive. Soon, a broader movement began with #BlackinX, where Black scientists from other fields were similarly elevated.

Last week, Walker co-authored an article in the journal Nature Astronomy entitled, "The representation of Blackness in astronomy."

A similar article was published in Wired magazine on June 7 entitled, "The unwritten laws of physics for Black women," which examined the experience of Black womenin physics academia.

The thread that weaves through these scientists' stories is one of isolation. They struggle with being the only Black person in a given program or classroom; their ideas aren't valued; and there are no or few Black mentors.

According to the American Physical Society, Black people make up roughly 15 per cent of the U.S. population aged 20-24,but only about three per cent of those who receive a bachelor's degree in physics. When it comes to PhDs, that number falls to little more than two per cent.

In Canada, the ratio is similar.

Kevin Hewitt, a professor in the department of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University in Halifax,led a survey for the Canadian Association of Physicists (which includes those in the fields of astronomy and astrophysics)in 2020. Itfound only one per cent of respondents aged 18-34 identified as Black.In the broader Canadian population, six per cent of people 18-34 identify as Black.

"Black Canadian physicists, we're quite a small number," said Hewitt. "I know personallyabout 10 others, including students and faculty."

Hewitt is activein bringing STEM to Black youth.Heco-foundedImhotep's Legacy Academy, a STEM outreach program in Nova Scotia for Black students. His programs include the Young, Gifted and Black Future Physicists Initiative, a summer camp at Dalhousie.

Why are there so few Black Canadian scientists in general, but in particular, those who seek out a career in astronomical science?

One of the problems may be found in the education system.

Take the province of Ontario, for example. Until recently, high schools there had a "streaming" program, which directed students into different post-secondary routes."Academic" courses were more challenging and required for university;"applied" courses prepared students for college and trades;and "essentials" provided support for students in meeting the requirements to graduate.

In 2017, a reportled by Carl James, a professor in the faculty of education at York University in Toronto, found that only 53 per cent of Black students in the Toronto District School Board were put in academic programs, compared to 81 per cent of white students and 80 per cent of other racialized students.

Conversely, 39 per cent of Black students were enrolled in applied programs, compared to 16 per cent of white students and 18 per cent of other racialized students.

"What we found in that study was many of the [Black]parents were talking about how their children were streamed into vocational or essential or low-level courses," James said. Some parents would try to "intervene," he said, but their concerns fell on deaf ears.

James says another aspect is that some cultural groups tend to want their children to go into particular high-end professions, such as law or medicine. If a child expresses a desire to pursue a program of study outside of what their parentswant or know, they may not be supported.

"[Parents]might know a teacher,they might know lawyers, but they might not know much about engineers. They might not know much about science," James said. "The question for some parents might be, how do I support my child in those areas if [I'm not familiar] with it?"

Hakeem Oluseyi, an astrophysicist and STEM educator in the U.S. who is prolific in the astronomical community, believes that science literacy and an interest in science begins at home.

"The point I always make is you can't educate the kids without educating the adults," he said. And parents who go so far as to teach their children math and science at home have an even greater advantage.

But James doesn't think that's enough.

"We just can't look atthe why, and what we should be doing as only the parents because I, as a parent, could do everything possible," he said. Even so, he acknowledged many Black kids don't make it in sciencebecause "somebody ... did not enable and support them."

That's a big part of the problem.Areport by the U.S. Education Advisory Board (EAS) found that 40 per cent of Black students drop out of STEM-related programs across the country. While there's no definitive reason, the study suggested it could be related to discrimination within academiaand that recurring sense of isolation. (Although there issome data on race in Canadian universities, there is noequivalent data on those who leave STEM-related studies.)

This doesn't surprise James.

"You can have the skills and ability. But at the same time, once you're in that position, you're undermined in every way possible," James said. "How long are you going to live in thatsituation?"

Margaret Ikape,a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, says she's largely had a positive experience in her field. But, she too, has a sense of being alone in her community.

"You feel that you're breaking new ground," said Ikape, who originally hails from Nigeria."You don't see anybody like you that has done it before you, and so it's really scary."

Shewishes there were more mentors."Sometimes I feel like I would rather speak to someone that would probably understand where I'm coming from."

The fact that there is discrimination implicit or explicit or even a feeling of alienationshouldn't come as a surprise, says Oluseyi.

"You know, there's this standard framing of, 'Oh, [astrophysics is]so racist,' and yadda, yadda, yadda. And I'm gonna make the claim that of course it is, because we're embedded in a society," he said."And that bigger society definitely comes into our field, and who we are in our field is a subset of society."

Back in sunny California, Edwards reflects on her own experience, saying she was fortunatein some ways. Growing up inVictoria, B.C.,a very white city,she had already dealt with asense of isolation, so it wasn't anything new to her once shegotinto astrophysics.But she admits it took her some time to meet another Black astrophysicist.

Edwards says Black in Astro Week is a good way to elevate Black voices and show Black childrenthat not only are there Black astronomers and physicists, there is a place for themin science.

Edwards expressed gratitude to Black in Astro Week founder Ashley Walker, as well as the Vanguard STEM, a similar initiative. "[It] gives wonderful space to a variety of physicists and scientists and astronomers so that different folks can see that, you know, they don't have to fit one particular mould in order to do it."

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Where are all the Black astronomers and physicists? Racism, isolation keeping many away - CBC News

Image: ESA/Hubble and NASA/J. Dalcanton.

NGC 2217, in the constellation of Canis Major and located about 65 million light years away, is a galaxy in transition. It appears as a ring galaxy, with a central bar inside an oval-shaped ring, enclosed further out by two tightly wound spiral arms. There appears to be clear space between the inner oval and the outer ring, though in reality that space will contain faint stars and gas. Galactic structures such as these often form following a head on collision with another, smaller galaxy.

The outer ring is still forming stars, but the inner oval is red and dusty. Star formation there appears to have ceased, and the light is increasingly dominated by interstellar dust reflecting starlight. Galaxies with this smeared-out, dusty appearance are known as lenticular galaxies, which NGC 2217 seems to be turning into. Look closely, however, and youll notice two things about the galaxys core. One is that the galaxy has not one, but two bars, with the second, inner, bar hidden at the centre of the outer bar. These are so-called nested bars, with one nestled inside the other. The longer outer bar formed first and funnelled gas from the outer regions of the galaxy into the centre, where that gas formed stars and, in this case, those stars and the funnelled gas became the basis of an inner bar. And the second thing to notice about NGC 2217s core is that the inner bar has a blue tint, indicative of hot, young stars that are still being born there.

Nested-bar galaxies could be hugely important in the overall evolution of galaxies and the intergalactic medium. Double bars are thought to be more efficient at funnelling gas into the centre of a galaxy than just a single bar. This gas, besides forming stars, also feeds the supermassive black hole that lurks at the centre of a galaxy. When one of these black holes is overfed, it can spew some of its meal back out into space, in the form of radiation called feedback. This feedback can forever alter a galaxy, blowing all its star-forming material away into the intergalactic medium.

Galaxies with double bars have only really been known about since the late 1990s, when the likes of the Hubble Space Telescope, which took this image, were finally able to resolve the smaller inner bars. Today, about 50 nearby spiral galaxies are known to have nested bars, and its estimated that up to 30 per cent of all barred spirals have double bars. Image: ESA/Hubble and NASA/J. Dalcanton.

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NGC 2217, is a galaxy in transition Astronomy Now - Astronomy Now Online

Stars are born when clouds of dust and gas form into clumps, and these clumps attract more material because of their gravity. Eventually, when enough material has fused together, the knot collapses under its own gravity and gets hot, becoming a protostar. This becomes the core of a star, which evolves from it (via NASA).

That's why nebulae, which are clouds of dust and gas, are often hotbeds of star formation. But it's not only the case that nebulae create stars the stars which are born can affect the structure of a nebula in turn as well.

In the case of the Tarantula Nebula, the researchers mapped the cold gas of the nebula to see how it was affected by star formation. According to ESO, the images, which combine the ALMA radio data overlaid over previous infrared observations from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and ESO's Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, show wisps of gas which are likely the remnants of star formation.

The spidery shape of the Tarantula Nebula's gas clouds show cold, dense gas that has the potential to collapse and form new stars, according to the data collected by ALMA (via ESO).

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How Astronomers Are Investigating This Nebula Where Stars Are Being Born - SlashGear

They don't call Jupiter "King of Planets" for nothing. It's massive, really heavy, andnow scientists think it ate chunks of other planets to get as big as it is.

That's right, the gas giant named after Greek and Roman gods is thought to have absorbed a series of small "planetesimals" en route to claiming its place as the biggest planet in the solar system.

The theory comes from an international team of astronomers led by Yamila Miguel from the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research and is set out in an article in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

It follows news last year that NASA scientists are baffled by the discovery that the planet's Great Red Spot is accelerating.

When NASA's Juno space mission arrived at Jupiter in 2016, scientists caught a glimpse of the remarkable beauty of the fifth planet from the sun.

Besides the famous Great Red Spot, Jupiter turns out to be littered with hurricanes, almost giving it the appearance and mystique of a Van Gogh painting.

But what lay underneath the outer layer was not immediately clear.

Juno was however able to measure variations in gravitational pull above different locations on the planet's surface, giving the astronomers information about what lay below.

What they found was not a homogenous and well-mixed composition, but instead a higher concentration of "metals" - elements heavier than hydrogen and helium - towards the centre of the planet.

The team of astronomers says the most likely explanation is that Jupiter absorbed numbers of "planetesimals", getting bigger and bigger.

Planetesimals are one of a class of bodies that are believed to have coalesced to form Earth and the other planets after condensing from concentrations of diffuse matter early in the history of the solar system.

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How did Jupiter get so big? Astronomers now think it 'ate' chunks of other planets - Sky News