Category Archives: Astronomy

2022 ARCS Scholars

University of Hawaii at Mnoa Institute for Astronomy doctoral candidate Miles Lucas and John A. Burns School of Medicine PhD student Nicholas Kawasaki were named ARCS Foundation Honolulu Chapters 2022 Scholars of the Year. Lucas received the Jacquie Maly ARCS Scholar of the Year Award for best presentation in physical sciences at the ARCS Scholar Symposium earlier in the spring. Kawasaki received the Sherry Lundeen ARCS Scholar of the Year Award for best presentation in the biological sciences.

ARCS Honolulu Chapter provided the two $1,000 Scholar of the Year grants in addition to $5,000 awarded to each of the 20 UH Mnoa PhD candidates named ARCS Scholars in 2022.

The non-profit volunteer group works to advance science in America by providing unrestricted funding to outstanding U.S. graduate students in STEM fields. The Honolulu chapter has provided more than $2.7 million to UH for more than 650 graduate students since 1974.

The 2022 awards were made within six UH Mnoa units. For more information about each scholar, including links to videos in which they describe their research, go to the ARCS website.

Jason Hinkle received the Columbia Communications Award. He looks for trends in data from different spectra to study supermassive black holes that lie at the center of most massive galaxies, including the Milky Way. The goal is a better understanding of how galaxies evolve.

Miles Lucas received the George and Mona Elmore ARCS Award. He works to design instruments, observational techniques and processing methods for directly imaging exoplanets and planet-forming regions. He hopes new ways of seeing largely invisible gasses will help explain planet formation.

Aneesa Golshan received the Kai Bowden ARCS Award. Golshan wants to improve vaccine delivery systems and adjuvants that trigger and ramp up immune response. She studies the optimal size of iron oxide nanoparticles, which are a safe, inexpensive, stable and highly reproducible contender.

Nicholas Kawasaki received the Guy Moulton Yates ARCS Award. He uses mouse models to study ferroptosis, an iron-dependent form of cell death that occurs in the heart after blood flow is restored following a heart attack. Intervention by an inhibitor might reduce cell death after a heart attack. Kawasaki is co-author of a book chapter on the topic with 2011 ARCS Scholar Jason Higa, now an assistant professor at JABSOM.

Katie Lee received the George and Mona Elmore Award. Lee also uses mice to examine what happens in the heart after an attack. She is examining the role of PKM genes in regulating the hearts use of glucose for energy following cardiac events in the hopes of ensuring better outcomes.

Ahmed Afifi received the Bretzlaff Foundation ARCS Award. Afifi quantifies virtual water, the volume consumed to produce commercial products, such as food crops. He envisions international trade in virtual water as a way to develop management strategies that could conserve water and mitigate political conflicts.

Rintaro Hayashi received the Frederick M. Kresser ARCS Award. He takes inspiration from tiny ubiquitous marine crustaceans called copepods, which use appendages to swim, pump and sense, to design equally tiny robots that can operate in a fluid environment.

Richard (Trey) Carney III received the Sarah Ann Martin ARCS Award. He worked on systems for unmanned aerial vehicles and quadcopters, but his recent research applies mathematical modeling to the COVID-19 epidemic. He seeks to balance cumbersome compartmentalized models, which track individuals, with network aggregation systems to better track and predict spread of the disease.

Ana Flores received the Maybelle F. Roth ARCS Award. Flores has grown Hawaiis native poppy, pua kala, under controlled conditions to study how plants respond to environmental stresses, such as heat and drought, at various stages of development. Field experiments are next.

Kazuumi Fujioka received the Sarah Ann Martin ARCS Award. Fujioka uses computational methods to visualize chemical reactions with molecular dynamics, seeking faster, more accurate methods for understanding how atoms interact. With stronger agreement between experimental and calculation approaches, chemists could better describe whats happening in difficult-to-observe conditions, such as astro-chemistry.

Holden Jones received the Ellen M. Koenig ARCS Award. Jones was introduced to the Amazon rainforests during a summer undergraduate experience. His ARCS award augments a Fulbright research stipend for PhD work in cacao agroforests in Ecuador. He studies amphibians as an indicator species to gauge the impact of monoculture plantations and environmental stressors on ecosystem diversity.

Kevin Keefe received the Honolulu ARCS Award. Keefe explores new ways to detect the tiniest particles in the massive Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment accelerators, using time rather than charge. An invited speaker at professional conferences and former teacher, he describes experimentalists as people looking to break things.

Helen Sung received the Ellen M. Koenig ARCS Award. Sung studies the hybridization of fresh- and salt-water crocodiles as habitat loss pushes them into increasingly overlapping territory. She will discuss her findings, hybridizations impact on adaptation and what that means for conservation strategies at the International Union for Conservation of Natures Species Survival CommissionCrocodile Specialist SubGroup meeting in Mexico.

Benjamin Strauss received the Ellen M. Koenig ARCS Award. Strauss works at the intersection of biology and technology. He applies machine learning and neural networks to large datasets on protein structures, seeking to predict protein functions based on different ways they are folded into 3D structures.

Marley Chertok received the Toby Lee ARCS Award. Chertok uses remote sensing techniques to look at impact craters on the lunar surface in order to learn what they reveal about hidden ancient interior lava flows. She previously worked on a geologic history of Northwestern Zambia to assist with an environmental impact study related to refugee resettlement.

Terrence J. Corrigan received the George and Marie Elmore ARCS Award. Corrigan is a storm chaser. He will aim Stereo Atmospheric Motion Monitor cameras at the Koolau range to gauge the interplay of wind and topography. His goal is to predict when simple tradewind showers will evolve into severe rotating thunderstorms, such as the 2018 supercell thunderstorm over Kauai that shattered previous 24-hour U.S. rainfall records.

Shannon McClish received the George and Mona Elmore ARCS Award. McClish studies the impact of seasonal changes in Antarctic Sea ice on nutrient and carbon dioxide uptake and release by phytoplankton. Robotic floats let her collect data during periods when ship-based sampling isnt possible. She hopes to work at the intersection of science research and policy.

Sarah Tucker received the George and Mona Elmore ARCS Award. Tucker has demonstrated an uncanny ability to grow a ubiquitous group of bacteria called SAR11 in the laboratory. Using bacteria grown in the lab and collected in Kneohe Bay, she unravels the metabolic pathways at work in this important but little understood player in global carbon cycles.

Rina Carrillo received the Helen Jones Farrar ARCS Award. Carrillo is interested in how plants respond to stress. A gene called Pdi9 may play a protective role as heat causes proteins to unfold and fold irregularly. Understanding the process could lead to better strategies for improving plant tolerance to heat as temperatures continue to rise.

Shannon Wilson received the Joseph Parker ARCS Award. She studies the twoline spittlebug, a significant agricultural pest affecting sugarcane and pasture grass. She has collected spittlebug population and host plant data from Hawaii cattle ranches and is testing nine species of grasses to identify the most resistant strains.

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UH astronomy, medical students named ARCS Scholars of the Year | University of Hawaii System News - University of Hawaii

Figure 1: At the start of the third nights imaging run, the author slewed onto M27, the Dumbbell Nebula in Vulpecula. Shown here is the placement of the target on the sensor, just fractionally offset from the crosshair marker and requiring no further centring. All images: Nik Szymanek.

In the previous two issues, we assessed The Sky Imaging Editions (TSIEs) capabilities for creating an equatorial-mount pointing model using TPoint, and tested its functionality during autofocusing and autoguiding. TSIE comes with TPoint included, in addition to a Camera Add-on that allows full control of CCD cameras along with autoguiders, focusers, filter-wheels, rotators and dome control. So in this final part of my exploration of TSIEs capabilities, Ill assess how it performs during an imaging run, and cover some of the softwares new features.

After firing up TSIE on my observatory laptop, it took only a minute or so to connect all of my imaging devices to it and to cool my QSI 683wsg CCD camera to an operating temperature of 15 degrees Celsius. I chose a nice, easy first target, M27, the famous Dumbbell Nebula in the constellation of Vulpecula. Figure 1 shows the zoomed-in field after slewing onto the target. The central star was offset by a tiny amount and I didnt feel the need for any further accuracy. Id called upon the @Focus2 autofocusing routine to focus the image and it did a great job first time (see last issue for details on both @Focus2 and @Focus3).

After downloading a dark-subtracted image, which was taken with my Starlight Xpress Lodestar guide camera, I was able to choose a suitable star for guiding. The sensitivity of the Lodestar coupled with the QSI cameras integral off-axis guider port means that its always possible to find a guide star with exposures of around five seconds. I shot a few two-minute exposures with a luminance filter to ensure that all was well and by that point M27 was nearing the meridian. After a full meridian flip, M27 appeared with just a tiny offset from the crosshair centre, so I shot a 10-minute exposure to use as a luminance file and I combined it with the earlier two-minute exposures.

Next, I planned to take a sequence of images through red, green and blue filters. When imaging the deep sky, most astrophotographers take long sequences of exposures that will be calibrated, aligned and stacked to produce a master light-frame. The exposure sequence can be automated and in TSIE its done using the Take Series tab in the Camera menu. Figure 2 shows the menu with the Take Series tab selected. At centre is where the sequence is set up. Clicking on any of the fields, such as the exposure duration shown in blue, allows a particular preference to be inserted, in this case 300 seconds for the exposure time. Below that are binning, type of frame (i.e. dark, light, flat, etc.), filter, how many frames to take (repeat), and a choice of calibration frame to be used. I left this on none, to apply my own calibrations later. Clicking on Add Series does just that and, for Series 2, I left everything the same but changed the filter setting to red. I then created two additional series, set up for the green and blue filters. Theres a choice to use Per series, which in our case would capture and save twelve 300-second exposures through the luminance filter, or Across series, which would take a 300-second exposure through the luminance filter and then change to the red, green and blue filters consecutively. I left this on Per Series.

Below that are options to set up dithering. This is an important procedure to use. Basically, the mount is offset by a few pixels at the end of every exposure so that when the images are aligned, noise in the images is also offset rather than stacking up in registration. During the stacking process (using stars for alignment), a reference frame is chosen and usually this is the frame with the best tracking and FWHM values. After comparison with the reference frame, noise in the remaining images is more easily subtracted and replaced with average-value pixels, producing a much cleaner image.

As seen in Figure 2, when setting up the dithering procedure I used a shift of three pixels. Its also critical to use an exposure delay to allow the guiding to settle after dithering has occurred, and for this I chose thirty seconds.

The Automatically save photos box must be ticked, and then clicking on the AutoSave button opens a menu where you can choose a file location for the images to be saved to. I found this menu to be a bit awkward because without user-intervention the file name for each image was long and clunky. Fortunately, under the Customize AutoSave File Names, you can include useful descriptions in each saved-file name. The Abbreviations Key information at the bottom lists available options that can be used (see Figure 3). I first chose the subject title from the File name prefix, in this case M27. Then under the Light frames field I typed :b :e :f :l and this inserted, respectively, binning status, exposure time in seconds, filter name, and image type (a light frame in this case). A resulting file name in this sequence would be, for example, M27 22 Blue 300 L 00000001.fit.

Within the menu, under the Sample AutoSave file name field, you can see a preview of the file name with the chosen parameters before starting the series capture. Each series records the appropriate filter used, making it easy to differentiate the images when applying calibrations and stacking at a later date. Clicking on the Take Series button at top left initiates the imaging sequence. Although I used a very small imaging run (hence the choice of a bright target), the sequence worked flawlessly, producing the LRGB image of M27 shown in Figure 4.

As the sky conditions were so good, I slewed onto NGC 6946, which is a lovely face-on spiral galaxy in Cygnus. Since it is a fairly bright galaxy, I initiated another short imaging run using LRGB filters. The resulting image after processing is shown in Figure 5. After a couple of nights using TSIE, I found that the interface became quite intuitive to use and navigate. There was a lot of switching between tabs to access different devices, but it all became quite natural to use and it was great to have all aspects of the imaging and telescope control within the same program. Also highly commendable was the fact that at all times TSIE was completely stable, with no crashes or hanging, or any form of delay when switching between devices.

TSIE has some new features that are worth mentioning. The first is a collimation tool to assess the alignment of mirrors in a reflecting telescope. The tool is located in the Camera menu under Focusing Tools (the same location as @Focus2 and @Focus3). Clicking on the Collimation button launches the view shown in Figure 6. At the centre is a defocused image of the star Alpheratz (alpha [] Andromedae). At top right of the screen is where the exposure, binning and filter are chosen. Clicking on the Take Sample button takes an image and displays it on the screen. Clicking on the Loop button runs a continuous series of images. I used my Paramounts hand paddle to gently nudge the star images to the centre of the screen and then adjusted the size of the red rings to match as closely as possible the inner and outer edges of the defocused star. This helps with assessing the circularity of the star image and whether the secondary mirror is positioned at the centre. The ring dimensions are adjusted using the two sliders at the bottom of the screen. When a star is selected, you can zoom in and create a sub-frame that matches the zoomed view, speeding up download times. Its also possible to save the focusers current position, defocus the star for assessment and then return the focuser to its starting position. The menu also incorporates autofocusing using the brilliant @Focus3 routine. This is definitely a handy tool to do a quick check on the collimation of your mirrors.

There are three buttons at lower right: Inspection Mode, which shows the star without the crosshairs; Crosshairs, which gives the view shown in Figure 6; and Four corners, which splits the view to show the corners of the sensor to allow you to check for image planarity. I slewed my telescope onto the Double Cluster in Perseus and took a seven-second exposure with a luminance filter. That placed plenty of stars in the field of view (Figure 7). The user manual suggests defocusing star images and then adjusting the image plane if possible (some cameras have tip-tilt adjusters for this purpose) until all the out-of-focus stars appear the same size in each corner. The stars in this image looked pretty similar in size but I noticed a few non-circular outliers. I suspect these were caused by my focal reducer but they could also be the result of the quality of the main telescopes optics tailing off in the extreme corners.

Another nice new feature is the live-stacking tool, which is accessed under the Camera menu. Clicking on the Take Photo tab opens another menu and then clicking on Live Stack brings up the screen shown in Figure 8. The purpose of this tool is to take multiple exposures that are aligned and stacked on-the-fly to build up a strong image. To test this I slewed the telescope onto M31, the magnificent Andromeda Galaxy, and from the options given at the top right of the screen I selected an exposure time of 30 seconds with the camera binned 2 2 through a luminance filter. Id taken suitable dark and flat-field images before starting the live stack, so I loaded them using the Calibration Frames button at top right. Clicking on the big Start! button initiated the procedure. As the first frame downloaded, it appeared on the screen looking quite good. As the second image downloaded, it was automatically aligned and stacked, and so on. At upper right is an Images readout, where the number of images taken is displayed and also how much the noise component has been reduced.

The whole purpose of stacking images is to reduce noise. The signal component of stars, galaxies, etc., adds in a linear sense, whereas the noise component only adds as the square root of the total number of images taken, so taking lots of images results in a great signal-to-noise ratio. I shot thirteen images and was informed that there was 72.26 per cent less noise compared to a single 30-second exposure. When the sequence finished, I saved the image as a FITS file. You can also elect to save each of the individual FITS images. I think this tool would be great for observatory open evenings, where many people can see the image building up on screen. Its possible to take images with a one-shot colour camera and see a colour image continuing to improve as more and more sub-frames are taken. Objects like the Orion Nebula would work well in this context.

I experienced three hugely enjoyable nights putting The Sky Imaging Edition through its paces. As an integrated package, it worked flawlessly, and it was easy to switch between controlling the imaging equipment and controlling the telescope. As mentioned earlier, the product is stable and efficient. Is it worth its steep $595 price tag? For sure its a considerable outlay, especially given that it is in competition with free programs such as N.I.N.A. and APT (Astro Photography Tool),but considering the power of TPoint for mount modelling and polar-alignment assistance, complete hardware functionality and a brilliant planetarium package, I think it is definitely good value for the money.

At a glance

Minimum system requirements

macOS:2GHz Intel Core Duo or faster,macOS Sierra (10.12), High Sierra (10.13), Mojave (10.14) or Catalina (10.15) 512MB RAM, 64MB video RAM, 2.5GB disk space

Windows:1.5GHz or faster,Intel Pentium 4, Pentium M, Pentium D or better, or AMD K-8 (Athlon) or better, Windows 10,512MB RAM, 128MB video RAM, 2.5GB disk space

Linux:A computer running 64-bit x86 Linux Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or later,Ubuntu GUI and OpenGL,512MB RAM, 2GB minimum disc space

Raspberry Pi:Third-generation Raspberry Pi device (Raspberry Pi 3 Model B or later) SanDisk Ultra PLUS 16GB microSDHC UHS-1 card,2GB minimum free space, Well-ventilated project case (fan not necessary) Optional external 9-pin serial port

Price: $595

Details: bisque.com

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The Sky Imaging Edition: Part 3 Astronomy Now - Astronomy Now Online

We know that essentially all big galaxies, like our own Milky Way, have supermassive black holes in their centers. We also strongly suspect these enormous monsters with millions or billions of times the Suns mass may have grown from smaller seed black holes called intermediate-mass black holes or IMBHs which have thousands to hundreds of thousands of solar masses.

We also know that smaller galaxies, called dwarf galaxies, have biggish black holes in them, most probably IMBHs. But do all dwarf galaxies have them, or some percentage, or what? Thats hard to say. When a black hole is actively feeding, gobbling down interstellar material, that matter gets infernally hot and bright, making it easy to spot. However, dwarf galaxies also tend to make stars at a high rate, which also emits a lot of light and can mimic the appearance of having a bright, feeding black hole.

A new method recently developed by a team of astronomers tweaks an older method to separate the two processes, and does a much better job at finding active black holes than the old way. And it has revealed a veritable treasure trove of black holes in nearby dwarf galaxies [link to paper].

The methods used here are subtle. Unlike the Sun, which emits light at all wavelengths in a continuum, gas clouds in space emit light at very specific wavelengths think of them as colors which astronomers call lines. If you want some details, I wrote about this process in an earlier article, and cover it in detail in my episode of Crash Course Astronomy: Light. Each element in a gas cloud emits light in a set of narrow colors, and this acts like a fingerprint that tells us that element is there, as well as things like how much is there, how hot it is, what the density is, and more.

Both matter swirling around in a black hole and gas clouds forming stars emit these lines, and its a long and somewhat complicated chain of measurements needed to distinguish the two, looking at ratios of the intensities of the lines emitted by oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur, for example. Theres a standard set of line ratios used to look at dwarf galaxies and see if they have active black holes versus lots of star formation, and what the astronomers found is that this method doesnt work well if a dwarf galaxy is being really fecund making lots of stars at a high rate or if the galaxy has a lower than usual amount of heavy elements in it. Or both.

Thing is, this is the case for a lot of nearby dwarf galaxies! So the standard method isnt working well and potentially missing a lot of active black holes in these wee nearby galaxies. So, in a nutshell, they tried using a different set of line ratios and applied it to a deep survey of the sky that looks at essentially every dwarf galaxy out to a certain distance from us.

What they found was startling: A lot of galaxies IDed as star-forming using the old method are in fact both making lots of stars and hosting an active black hole. The old method estimated that about 1% of all nearby dwarf galaxies were like this, but the new method shows they actually make up from 3 16%! Thats a lot more. Even better, they found that almost all the newly found double-duty dwarf galaxies have a low ratio of heavy elements, a clear indication that this new method has the advantage over the old one.

They were also able to make lots of sub-categories of galaxies, including ones with different types of black hole activity, which can depend on the orientation at which we see the material around it. Thats a big step as well, helping astronomers understand the detailed dynamics of whats happening in the hearts of dwarf galaxies.

All of this is important for two big reasons. One is that dwarf galaxies are everywhere, but are faint enough that seeing them at great distance is difficult. Categorizing the ones we see nearby will help astronomers understand ones at greater distance that are harder to study.

The other is that we think big galaxies grow in part due to eating dwarf galaxies. This happened a lot in the early Universe when galaxies were closer together, but it still happens today literally today, since we see their remains in the Milky Way. If we want to understand how big galaxies are born, grow, evolve, and turn into the mighty structures we see now, we need to understand the more humble dwarf galaxies. This is a good step in the right direction.

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Astronomers find a treasure trove of black holes in small galaxies - Syfy

The Universe is full of massive galaxies like ours, but astronomers dont fully understand how they grew and evolved. They know that the first galaxies formed at least as early as 670 million years after the Big Bang. They know that mergers play a role in the growth of galaxies. Astronomers also know that supermassive black holes are involved in the growth of galaxies, but they dont know precisely how.

A new Hubble survey of galaxies should help astronomers figure some of this out.

The survey is called 3D-Drift And SHift (3D-DASH.) 3D-DASH is a high-resolution near-infrared imaging and spectrometry survey of the sky that maps star-forming regions. Its the largest of its kind. The goal is to find rare galactic objects that the James Webb Space Telescope can target in follow-up observations.

A paper titled 3D-DASH: The Widest Near-Infrared Hubble Space Telescope Survey presents the new mosaic. Itll be published in The Astrophysical Journal and is currently available at the pre-press site arxiv.org. The lead author is Lamiya Mowla, Dunlap Fellow at the Faculty of Arts & Sciences Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.

Since its launch more than 30 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope has led a renaissance in the study of how galaxies have changed in the last 10-billion years of the Universe, said the lead author Mowla. The 3D-DASH program extends Hubbles legacy in wide-area imaging so we can begin to unravel the mysteries of the galaxies beyond our own.

3D-DASH is an improvement on an earlier effort called COSMOS. COSMOS covered a 2 square degree equatorial field using multiple space-based and ground-based telescopes, using spectroscopy, x-ray, and radio imaging. It contains over 2 million galaxies that span 75% of the age of the Universe.

3D-DASH improves on COSMOS by surveying its entire contents in near-infrared. Thats significant because it allows astronomers to see the most distant, earliest galaxies.

Survey size is critical in the study of galaxies. To be productive, surveys have to identify unique phenomena in the Universe: the most massive galaxies, the oldest galaxies, and galaxies on the verge of merging are critical to expanding our understanding of galaxies. So are highly active black holes. But to find those, astronomers need huge images that they can comb through.

Previous surveys werent as robust because they were ground-based. They suffered from low resolution, limiting what astronomers could learn from them. 3D-DASH doesnt suffer from those same limitations.

I am curious about giant galaxies, which are the most massive ones in the Universe formed by the mergers of other galaxies. How did their structures grow, and what drove the changes in their form? says Mowla, who began work on the project in 2015 while a grad student at Yale University. It was difficult to study these extremely rare events using existing images, which is what motivated the design of this large survey.

DASH stands for Drift And SHift, the name of the new imaging technique that Mowla and her colleagues. DASH is similar to taking a panoramic image with a smartphone. The method captures multiple images that are then stitched together into one enormous image. DASH is a huge time-saver and took images in 250 hours that previously wouldve taken 2000 hours.

It does this by capturing eight images per Hubble orbit rather than one. Only the first of each of the eight images is pointed, and the following seven are unguided and taken while the Hubble drifts and shifts. The technique means that the data reduction procedures are more demanding, but the result is worth it.

3D-DASH adds a new layer of unique observations in the COSMOS field and is also a steppingstone to the space surveys of the next decade, says Ivelina Momcheva, head of data science at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and principal investigator of the study. It gives us a sneak peek of future scientific discoveries and allows us to develop new techniques to analyze these large datasets.

3D-DASH provides a list of galactic targets for the James Webb Space Telescope, which should start science observations soon. The Early Universe and Galaxies Over Time are two of the JWSTs overarching science objectives. Webbs unprecedented infrared sensitivity will help astronomers to compare the faintest, earliest galaxies to todays grand spirals and ellipticals, helping us to understand how galaxies assemble over billions of years, NASA writes. The list of targets from 3D-DASH will help advance those objectives.

You can explore an online version of the mosaic here.

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Hubble Finds a Bunch of Galaxies That Webb Should Check out - Universe Today

Explore astronomy at Jodrell Banks First Light Pavilion in Cheshire

Jodrell Bank observatory reveals the First Light Pavilion in Englands Cheshire, courtesy of architecture studio Hassell

Sat at the heart of a Unesco World Heritage Site, Cheshires Jodrell Bank in England, the First LightPavilion is quietly nestled in the green landscapes rolling hills. The site, by the small town of Macclesfield, is home to anobservatory first established in 1945 by radio astronomer Bernard Lovell, and it includes the impressive Lovell Telescope. Now, this new piece of pavilion architecture, designed by Hassell, has been added to the popular tourist destination, as a centrethat welcomes visitors who want to find out more about astronomy, science and technology at Jodrell Bankand beyond.

The pavilionaims to open up the inspirational history of Jodrell Bank by engaging visitors with the fantastic stories of its pioneering scientists and their groundbreaking feats of science and engineering, offers a Jodrell Bank statement.At the same time, its architecture, defined by gentle concrete curves, was conceived to be subtle and respond to its leafy context and the nearby, familiar forms of the Lovell Telescopeand astronomyequipment in general.

The First Light Pavilions76m-diameter dome is topped by grass, ensuring it commands a clear, yetdiscreet presence in the Jodrell Bank campus. Inside,exhibition designerCasson Mann composed a display that tells the story of the site and thescience ofthe exploration of the universe using radio waves instead of visible light. Within the exhibits, interactiveprojected animations by digital media studio Squint/Opera, in partnership with exhibition builderRealm and software developerISO, promisean informative andengaging visit for guests.

That transformational development in this quiet corner of Cheshire completely opened up humanitys understanding of the universe and allowed us to discover previously undreamt of things such as pulsars, quasars, and even the fading glow of the Big Bang, says professor Tim OBrien, associate director at theJodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. Jodrell Bank is host to the worlds oldest existing radio astronomy observatory, and the First Light Pavilion visitor centre celebrates this through its gentle presence and contextual nature.

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Explore astronomy at Jodrell Banks First Light Pavilion in Cheshire - Wallpaper*

Astronomy is progressing rapidly these days, thanks in part to how advances in one area can contribute to progress in another. For instance, improved optics, instruments, and data processing methods have allowed astronomers to push the boundaries of optical and infrared to gravitational wave (GW) astronomy. Radio astronomy is also advancing considerably thanks to arrays like the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, which will join with observatories in Australia in the near future to create the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

In particular, radio astronomers are using next-generation instruments to study phenomena like Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and neutron stars. Recently, an international team of scientists led by the University of Manchester discovered a strange radio-emitting neutron star with a powerful magnetic field (a magnetar) and an extremely slow rotational period of 76 seconds. This discovery could have significant implications for radio astronomy and hints at a possible connection between different types of neutron stars and FRBs.

The research was led by astrophysicists Manisha Caleb, Ian Heywood, and Benjamin Stappers from the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. They were joined by researchers from the MeerTRAP (More Transients and Pulsars) group, an international consortium funded by the European Research Council (ERC) that collaborates closely with the Max-Planck Institut fr Radioastronomie (MPIfR) and multiple European universities and research institutes. The paper that describes their discovery recently appeared in Nature Astronomy.

Neutron stars are the extremely dense remnants of massive stars that have undergone gravitational collapse and shed their outer layers in a supernova. These stars often have very fast spins, and their powerful magnetic fields cause them to emit tight beams of radiation that sweep across the sky (hence the term magnetar). Astronomers are currently aware of about 3,000 pulsars in the Milky Way galaxy, and the timing of their pulses is used as a sort of astronomical beacon (or cosmic lighthouse).

In all previous cases, magnetars have been observed to have rapid rotational periods. But in this case, the team observed what appeared to be an ultra-long period magnetar, a theoretical class of neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields. The source was initially detected thanks to a single pulse observed by the MeerTRAP instrument piggybacking on observations led by The HUNtforDynamic andExplosiveRadiotransientswithmeerKAT (ThunderKAT) team.

The two then conducted follow-up observations together that confirmed the position of the source and the timing of the pulses. As Dr. Manisha Caleb, a former postdoctoral researcher from the University of Manchester and a current astrophysical researcher at the University of Sydney, said:

Amazingly we only detect radio emission from this source for 0.5% of its rotation period. This means that it is very fortuitous that the radio beam intersected with the Earth. It is therefore likely that there are many more of these very slowly spinning sources in the Galaxy which has important implications for how neutron stars are born and age.

The majority of pulsar surveys do not search for periods this long and so we have no idea how many of these sources there might be. In this case the source was bright enough that we could detect the single pulses with the MeerTRAP instrument at MeerKAT.

The sensitivity that MeerKAT provides, combined with the sophisticated searching that was possible withMeerTRAP and an ability to make simultaneous images of the sky, made this discovery possible, added Dr. Heywood, a senior researcher with the University of Oxford and a member of the ThunderKAT team who collaborated on this study. Even then, it took an eagle eye to recognize it for something that was possibly a real source because it was so unusual looking!

The newly-discovered neutron star, designated PSR J0901-4046 (for Pulsating Radio Source), is an especially interesting object that shows characteristics of pulsars, magnetars, and even fast radio bursts. This is indicated by the radio emissions that are consistent with pulsars which are also known for having longer orbital periods. In contrast, the chaotic sub-pulse components and the polarization of the pulses are consistent with magnetars.In addition to being a new type of neutron star that was only theorized previously, this discovery occurred in a well-studied part of the galaxy.

Radio surveys dont usually search for neutron stars or pulse periods that last more than a few tens of milliseconds (i.e., millisecond pulsars). Ben Stappers, a professor of astrophysics at Manchester University and the Principal Investigator of the MeerTRAP project, says that this discovery could mean that there are plenty of opportunities for new radio surveys in the region:

The radio emission from this neutron star is unlike any we have ever seen before. We get to view it for about 300 milliseconds, which is much longer than for the majority of other radio emitting neutron stars. There seem to be at least 7 different pulse types, some of which show strongly periodic structure, which could be interpreted as seismic vibrations of the neutron star. These pulses might be giving us vital insight into the nature of the emission mechanism for these sources.

Given how challenging this discovery was and the collaborative effort it took to make it, detecting similar sources is likely to be difficult. However, this implies that there could be a larger population of undetected long-period neutron stars just waiting to be discovered. This discovery also raises the possibility of a new class of radio transients ultra-long period neutron stars that suggest a possible connection between highly-magnetized neutron stars, ultra-long period magnetars, and fast radio bursts.

These results could help resolve the enduring mystery of what causes FRBs, which astronomers have puzzled over since the first was detected in 2007 (the Lorimer Burst). This is especially true in the rare instances where the source has been repeating in nature. While the study of this energetic phenomenon has also advanced considerably, astronomers are still unsure what causes them with explanations ranging from rotating neutron stars and black holes to possible extraterrestrial transmissions!

Further Reading: The University of Manchester, Nature Astronomy

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A Pulsar has Been Found Turning so Slowly Astronomers Didn't Even Think it was Possible: Once Every 76 Seconds - Universe Today

This visualization shows trajectories of asteroids found using ADAM (in green). Earths orbit is represented by a blue arc closer to the sun. (B612 Asteroid Institute / UW DiRAC Institute / Open Space Project)

Astronomers have used a cloud-based technique pioneered at the University of Washington to identify and track asteroids in bunches of a hundred or more. Their achievement could dramatically accelerate the quest to find potentially threatening space rocks.

The technique makes use of an open-source analysis platform known as Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping, or ADAM; plus a recently developed algorithm called Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, or THOR. The THOR algorithm was created by Joachim Moeyens, an Asteroid Institute Fellow at UW; and Mario Juric, director of UWs DiRAC Institute.

Teaming up ADAM and THOR may sound like a cross between a Bible story and a Marvel comic, but this dynamic duos superpower is strictly scientific: When ADAM runs the THOR algorithm, the software can determine the orbits of asteroids, even previously unidentified asteroids, by sifting through any large database of astronomical observations.

ADAM has been a long-term project for the Asteroid Institute, a program of the California-based B612 Foundation.

Discovering and tracking asteroids is crucial to understanding our solar system, enabling development of space, and protecting our planet from asteroid impacts, former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, the Asteroid Institutes executive director, said today in a news release. With THOR running on ADAM, any telescope with an archive can now become an asteroid search telescope.

To demonstrate the techniques power, Moeyens used THOR to analyze 30 days worth of imagery from the NOIRLab Source Catalog, a collection of nearly 68 billion observations made by the National Optical Astronomy Observatorys telescopes between 2012 and 2019.

The Asteroid Institutes ADAM platform is perfectly suited for the THOR algorithm, Moeyens explained. Built on Google Cloud, ADAMs innate scalability and computational power allows us to fully maximize THORs potential as a discovery algorithm and ultimately allows us to find those asteroids that have thus far remained undetected in archival datasets.

Out of 1,354 asteroid detections made using THOR, Moeyens selected a sampling of 113 candidates to submit to the International Astronomical Unions Minor Planet Center. The center, which maintains the authoritative list of asteroids, added 104 of the asteroids to its list. (The other nine turned out to be previously known asteroids.)

Most of the 104 asteroids are in the main belt, between Mars and Jupiter. None of them poses a threat to Earth.

Validation for the new asteroid search technique could open the way to discover tens of thousands of asteroids that are hidden within the data sets from NOIRLab and other telescope teams.

These developments couldnt have come at a better time.

When it comes to discovering an asteroid, being able to describe its orbit is a must. Nearly all of the more than 750,000 asteroids on the Minor Planet Centers list have been identified by tracking the shifts in their orbits, often starting out with shifts seen over the course of a single night.

Computers have taken a lot of the tedium out of that tracking task in recent years. Nevertheless, relying on single-night tracks, which astronomers call tracklets, can take you only so far.

Astronomers are reaching the limits of whats discoverable with current techniques and telescopes, Juric said.

Juric told GeekWire that the first stages in the evolution of astronomy focused on big glass, and bigger glass, and even bigger glass.

Then it turned into big cameras, and even bigger cameras, and even bigger instruments, he said. Now we have to add software to that component, because thats really where the next breakthrough is likely to happen.

Powered by Google Cloud, the ADAM-THOR technique can look at archival views of the night sky captured at different times, and then extrapolate from that data to pinpoint the same asteroid at different points in its orbit.

More about THOR: Check out the Asteroid Institutes FAQ about the ADAM-THOR asteroid search

Both Juric and Moeyens said identifying the first 104 asteroids was just the start. Its a small number of whats possibly in that data set, Moeyens told GeekWire. Juric estimated that the first round of analysis looked at a mere 0.2% of the total NOIRLab data set. Itll take several months to go through the whole database.

Well have a fun summer, Juric said.

Moeyens said the tracklet-less search technique neednt be limited to archival searches. With additional development, ADAM-THOR will be able to perform real-time asteroid discovery on observations as they come in from telescopes around the globe, he said.

The pace of real-time discovery is expected to go into overdrive when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (and its Simonyi Survey Telescope, named after Seattle software billionaire Charles Simonyi) comes online in Chile in 2024.

UWs DiRAC Institute is due to play a key role in analyzing data from the Rubin Observatory. For solar system studies, that observatory is going to be a once-in-a-generation game-changer, Juric said. To give you a sense of whats coming, were expecting anywhere between one to 10 interstellar objects per year to be discovered. Numbers of trans-Neptunian objects will go up by a factor of 10, and total numbers of asteroids will go up by a factor of five.

Looking beyond asteroids, THOR could well be used to find other kinds of solar system objects, perhaps even planets.

Were looking at trans-Neptunian objects and trying to extend the depth to which [the observatory] can see, in effect, by a factor of two, Juric said. So, twice as far as you could with traditional methods for looking for things like Planet Nine or dwarf planets.

The Asteroid Institute will also have a big role to play thanks to a financial boost from the B612 Foundation.

Last week, the B612 Foundation announced that its received $1.3 million in contributions to support the Asteroid Institute and the ADAM project. The foundation also has won a commitment from Titos Handmade Vodka to match additional contributions up to the $1 million level.

We are humbled and inspired by the generosity of our funding partners, Danica Remy, president and chief executive of the B612 Foundation, said in a news release. Their support over the years and into the future, along with Titos matching challenge, is helping us scale our technical team and expand our scientific, technical and educational partnerships.

Remy said the B612 Foundation, which was created 20 years ago to raise awareness about the perils and potential payoffs associated with asteroids, has a three-year goal to raise $4 million more to advance ADAM. These funds will enable ADAM to analyze historical data and future data coming from Vera Rubin Observatory and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will enable new asteroids discoveries and orbits, she said.

This report has been updated with quotes from UW astronomers Joachim Moeyens and Mario Juric.

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Astronomers demonstrate how using the cloud can rev up the race to find asteroids - GeekWire

There are times I just want to post a pretty astronomical image, something that delights the eyes and gives a sense of wonder about the sky.

The problem with this or problem, I should say is that theres no such thing as just a pretty picture. In every case, they wind up leading to some interesting cosmic insight.

But this time its more. This particular pretty picture may hold the key to how one of the critical components of our Milky Way galaxy formed.

So first, the eye candy:

Wow! That is Liller 1, a cluster of stars. Its generically called a globular cluster these are roughly spherical collections of hundreds of thousands of stars that orbit around their center of gravity. The Milky Way has about 160 such clusters, though some galaxies have many, many more. Regular readers know I love globulars, and have written about them a lot. Theyre beautiful, and many of them are easily spotted in small telescopes, so theyre a favorite of mine for many reasons.

Right away I knew Liller 1 was weird. Its so red! And the stars around it are so blue, so something must be up. In situations like this the first thing I do is check the filters used to see if the colors might be a bit skewed, messing up how we see things. In this Hubble image(and you should click that; the full-size image of Liller 1 there is jaw-dropping) it turns out the colors are indeed skewed, but, ironically, it doesnt matter.

In this image what you see as blue is actually red light. And what you see as red is actually near-infrared light, just outside what our eyes can detect. So no, this isnt displayed natural color more or less what youd see by eye but in fact this does show that the cluster is very, very red. Why?

In this case its location. Liller 1 is about 26,000 light-years away from us and very close to the galactic center, probably only a couple of thousand light-years from it. The Milky Ways core is loaded with clouds of dust made of tiny grains of rocky and sooty material which scatter away blue light. Only red light can get through to us, so any object there will look much redder than it really is. In this case, the Milky Way stars that we see as blue in the image are actually red stars, but the Liller 1 stars are exceptionally red due to the dust.

Still, this gave me pause. Globulars orbit the galactic center, and most are seen far from it in the sky. A few are relatively close to the center as they plunge through the galaxy on their orbits, but having one this close to the exact center struck me as odd.

And it is odd! Thats because Liller 1 is almost certainly not a globular cluster. Its the remains of what was once a much larger object that the Milky Way ate.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with a flat disk of stars, gas, and dust. In the center is what we call the bulge, generally a flattened spheroid of older, redder stars, though in different galaxies it has different shapes. Ours is lozenge-shaped, like a Tic Tac. How the bulge formed isnt clear, but one hypothesis is it came together as large structures fell to the galactic center and were stripped of their stars. Some of these structures may have been enormous clumps of stars and gas in the Milky Ways disk, and others could have been dwarf galaxies onto themselves, with a few billion stars in them.

Could Liller 1 be one of those dwarf galaxies? The evidence points strongly to it! Globulars tend to be very old, with a single population of ancient stars in them, usually over 12 billion years old. Some, though, have a second or even third population of stars that are younger, maybe 10 billion years. But looking at Liller 1s stars, astronomers found it has an old population of 12-billion-year-old stars and a second thats only 1- 2 billion years old! Thats a huge discrepancy, and shows that somehow it was able to make stars far more recently than globulars do.

But how? Globulars are well known not to have any gas in them they dont have enough gravity to hold onto it as massive stars explode and blow the gas out so they cant make stars. Liller 1, though, was somehow able to hold on to its gas for eons. Its likely more massive than your typical globular, with as much as 2.5 million times the mass of the Sun. But in the past it may have had a few billion solar masses of stars in it, again strongly implying it was once more like a small galaxy than a big cluster.

And its not alone. Terzan 5 is another globular-like cluster in the Milky Way core, and also has two distinct populations of stars in it; in fact the astronomers were suspicious of Liller 1 because they had previously examined Terzan 5 and came to the conclusion it too was what they call a bulge fossil fragment.

Both of these objects are difficult to see because of the dust obscuration, but imply there may be more of them in the core, partially hidden from view. If these truly are surviving structures from the birth of our galaxy and the construction of its bulge, they are critical pieces of the puzzle of how our Milky Way came to be the way it is. If we can find more, then solving that puzzle becomes more doable.

And its like I said: In astronomy, theres no such thing as just a pretty picture. There is always a much, much bigger picture its a part of.

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The secret of the bulge: A gorgeous partially digested galaxy in the Milky Ways core - Syfy

It may be a long shot, but "something spectacular" may be coming to the skies Monday night. Experts say there is the potential for people living anywhere in the Americas to see an extremely rare meteor storm on Memorial Day after the sun goes down.

The meteors may be visible as Earth passes through the remains of a comet that split apart three decades ago and is still fragmenting, CBS Denver reports. The comet named "Schwassmann-Wachmann 3" began to break up in 1995, and its debris is expected to intersect with the Earth's orbit which could result in an intense meteor shower called Tau Herculids.

A meteor shower is classified as a meteor storm when at least 1,000 meteors per hour are produced.

"If it actually passes through this broken up trail, you could see a lot of meteors every hour," Fraser Cain, publisher of the astronomy outlet "Universe Today," told KCBS Radio.

However, Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Societysays the meteors entering the atmosphere must be larger than normal in order to be seen from the ground.

Because of that, Lunsford says the meteor shower is highly unlikely -- but he adds: "We believe that this event has a chance of being something spectacular and that we would be remiss by not publicizing it."

According toEarthSky.org, the famous Leonid meteor storm of 1966 produced meteors falling at a rate of 40 meteors per second. Witnesses said they felt like they had to clutch the ground because of the impression of Earth moving through space.

NASA says astronomers have been observing the comet for nearly a century, and the comet's trajectory and path around the sun is well understood.

"Amateur and professional astronomers around the world have been tracking its spectacular disintegration for years," NASA said.

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Comet that split apart in 1995 could produce rare Tau Herculids meteor storm on Memorial Day: "Something spectacular" - CBS News

Spiral galaxy NGC 4603 containing Cepheids being used for distance measurements. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Maund

The top-ranked scientific justification for building the Hubble Space Telescope was to determine the size and age of the Universe through observations of Cepheid variables in distant galaxies. This scientific goal was so important that it put constraints on the lower limit of the size of Hubbles primary mirror. Cepheids are a special type of variable star with very stable and predictable brightness variations. The period of these variations depends on physical properties of the stars such as their mass and true brightness. This means that astronomers, just by looking at the variability of their light, can find out about the Cepheids physical nature, which then can be used very effectively to determine their distance. For this reason, cosmologists call Cepheids standard candles.

Astronomers have used Hubble to observe Cepheids with extraordinary results. The Cepheids have then been used as stepping-stones to make distance measurements for supernovae, which have, in turn, given a measure for the scale of the Universe. Today we know the age of the Universe to a much higher precision than before Hubble: around 13.7 billion years.

We certainly live in exciting times. Hubble has made enormous progress possible within cosmology. Today we have a much more unified cosmological picture than was possible even five years ago when people were talking of The Cosmology in Crisis. We have seen a dramatic change from misery to glory!

Gustav A. Tammann, Astronomer, University of Basel

Pictured is the supernova of the type Ia star 1994D, in galaxy NGC 4526. The supernova is the bright spot in the lower left corner of the image. Credit: ESA/Hubble

One of Hubbles initial core purposes was to determine the rate of expansion of the Universe, known to astronomers as the Hubble Constant. After eight years of Cepheid observations this work was concluded by finding that the expansion increases by 70 km/second for every 3.26 million light-years you look further out into space.

Hubbles sharp vision means that it can see exploding stars, supernovae that are billions of light years away, and difficult for other telescopes to study. A supernova image from the ground usually blends in with the image of its host galaxy. Hubble can distinguish the light from the two sources and thus measure the supernova directly.

For many years cosmologists have discussed whether the expansion of the Universe would stop in some distant future or continue ever more slowly. From the results of Hubbles supernova studies, it seems clear that the expansion is nowhere near slowing down. In fact, due to some mysterious property of space itself, called dark energy, the expansion is accelerating and will continue forever. This surprising conclusion came from combined measurements of remote supernovae with most of the worlds top-class telescopes, including Hubble. Furthermore, recent supernova results indicate that cosmos did not always accelerate, but began accelerating when the Universe was less than half its current age.

Since Hubbles measurement of the expansion of the Universe, there have been other more precise measurements, such as with the Spitzer Space Telescope. However, these different measurements havent been in agreement, causing a mystery and spawning new theories. New measurements with NASAs Roman Space Telescope or from gravitational waves may help resolve the controversy.

The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe led to three astronomers, Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt, being awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Hubble gave us the distance measurements of the first four supernovae that made us realize something was wrong with our present understanding of the Universe. Even though the definite proof that the Universe is accelerating came later, we could not reconcile our Hubble observations with a Universe where the expansion is slowing down.

Bruno Leibundgut, Astronomer, European Southern Observatory (ESO)

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Astronomy & Astrophysics 101: Measuring the Age and Size of the Universe - SciTechDaily