Category Archives: Astronomy

Close-up and wide views of the nearest pair of supermassive black holes.

Scientists have spotted a pair of the most powerful monsters known to humans, and this destructive duo is closer to our planet than any ever seen before.

Fortunately, the couple of supermassive black holes discovered by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile are still 89 million light years away from us in the galaxy NGC 7727. That's plenty far enough for humanity to be able to continue to sleep well at night for the rest of our existence without being kept up by the prospect that this terrible team is coming to swallow everything we've ever known.

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But while it's a comfortable distance, it's much closer than the previous record for a supermassive black hole pair, which is 470 million light years distant.

Karina Voggel, an astronomer at the Strasbourg Observatory in France, explains in a statement that these tumultuous twosomes form when huge galaxies merge and the supermassive black hole at the center of each set a course for collision.

"It is the first time we find two supermassive black holes that are this close to each other, less than half the separation of the previous record holder."

That separation is more than it appears, though, at 1,600 light years.

Voggel is also lead author of apaperdetailing the new discovery published online Tuesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Remarkably, when the two already supermassive black holes eventually do collide, the will create an even bigger nightmare void.

"The small separation and velocity of the two black holes indicate that they will merge into one monster black hole, probably within the next 250 million years," adds co-author Holger Baumgardt from the University of Queensland in Australia.

The researchers say they now expect to find even more such cosmic colossuses in deep space.

"Our finding implies that there might be many more of these relics of galaxy mergers out there and they may contain many hidden massive black holes that still wait to be found," says Voggel. "It could increase the total number of supermassive black holes known in the local Universe by 30 percent."

Some may be even closer to Earth, which should be okay, so long as we measure the distance in millions of light years.

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Astronomers spot supermassive black hole duo that's the closest to Earth yet - CNET

Theres something strange about the dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way.

These smaller galaxies orbit our own, but many of their orbits align along what astronomers term the vast polar structure: a pancake-shaped plane that intersects our own crepe-thin galaxy. Out of the dozens of known satellites in the Milky Ways retinue, about half of them, maybe even more, belong to this structure, dotting the plane like raisins in the pancake. Whats more this pancake rotates, the blueberries whirling around the Milky Way in the same direction.

This alignment has puzzled astronomers since the first hints of it appeared in the 1970s. Cosmological simulations dont generally predict this effect. Some researchers have even wondered if the problem is with our understanding of dark matter or of gravity itself.

In a paper posted to the astronomy preprint arXiv, Nicols Garavito Camargo (University of Arizona) and colleagues suggest the focus ought to be on the biggest of all the little fish: the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

The LMC is a massive dwarf, with at least a tenth the mass of the Milky Way. Its swinging around our galaxy for the first time on a trajectory that aligns with the vast polar structure, and it may have brought a half dozen smaller galaxies in with it. That cant be a coincidence, right? Astronomers have thought so, too, and several have suggested that the LMC has somehow inspired the mysterious polar structure.

In fact, earlier this year, Jenna Samuel (now at University of Texas, Austin) and colleagues made this case: Samuels led simulations to demonstrate that dwarf galaxies tend to align along cosmic pancakes and stay that way, at least for a while when theres a massive dwarf like the LMC in the mix.

The question is how: The LMC and its retinue are only a few of the Milky Ways many satellites, so it and its attendants cant account for the plane simply by falling in. Garavito Camargo and colleagues describe how the LMC could have affected the orbits of the other galaxies.

In short, the dwarf galaxy is throwing its weight around, affecting the Milky Way, its dark matter halo, and its satellites, all via the simple force of gravity. Not only does the dwarf pull on the other satellite galaxies ahead of it in its orbit, it also draws the material behind it into a wake. In addition, the researchers realized, they would need to account for their own place in the galaxy.

As it falls in, the LMC has pulled the Milky Way off-center. Our galaxy is enormous, though, and the shift in center of mass has taken time to travel outward. While the inner regions of the galaxy and its halo are already orbiting the new center of mass, the outer regions havent gotten the memo yet. So, from our perch in the inner galaxy, we see the outer regions rotate.

Were actually in a moving car, when we thought we were just sitting still, explains coauthor Gurtina Besla (University of Arizona). You see all these things move by you and you think theyre moving at some speed, but in fact were moving along with it and theyre actually moving slightly slower. In effect, when we see the satellite galaxies moving together in concert, some of that is simply the effect of our own motion something that we hadnt considered before.

Garavito Camargo, Besla, and colleagues combined all of these effects in a simulation of the LMCMilky Way encounter, confirming that the LMCs infall is capable of reshaping the orbits of numerous objects around the Milky Way.

Even taking all these effects together, though, they still might not fully explain the strange alignment of Milky Way satellites. Then again, they dont have to: After all, cosmological simulations do create planes of satellites, just not ones as organized as the one around the Milky Way.

The idea is that, after correcting for all these effects, the remaining plane may better resemble the structures predicted in cosmological simulations, Garavito Camargo says. All this together can create something thats kind-of weird and statistically more improbable than what you might find in a generic cosmological simulation.

The new work offers a fresh approach and one that is a very thorough and convincing piece of research, which naturally got me and others working on this issue very excited, says Marcel Pawlowski (Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam), who wasnt involved in the new study. He maintains, however, that theres still work to be done to understand the structures origin.

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How Our Largest Dwarf Galaxy Keeps the Others In Line - SkyandTelescope.com

In a first, astronomers may have seen light from the merger of two black holes, providing opportunities to learn about these mysterious dark objects.

This artist's concept shows a supermassive black hole surrounded by a disk of gas. Embedded in this disk are two smaller black holes that may have merged together to form a new black hole.

When two black holes spiral around each other and ultimately collide, they send out gravitational waves - ripples in space and time that can be detected with extremely sensitive instruments on Earth. Since black holes and black hole mergers are completely dark, these events are invisible to telescopes and other light-detecting instruments used by astronomers. However, theorists have come up with ideas about how a black hole merger could produce a light signal by causing nearby material to radiate.

Now, scientists using Caltech's Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) located at Palomar Observatory near San Diego may have spotted what could be just such a scenario. If confirmed, it would be the first known light flare from a pair of colliding black holes.

The merger was identified on May 21, 2019, by two gravitational wave detectors the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO,and the European Virgo detector in an event called GW190521g. That detection allowed the ZTF scientists to look for light signals from the location where the gravitational wave signal originated. These gravitational wave detectors have also spotted mergers between dense cosmic objects called neutron stars, and astronomers have identified light emissions from those collisions.

Learn more:What Is a Black Hole?

Black Hole Image Makes History; NASA Telescopes Coordinated Observations

Image Credit:Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

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Astronomy Picture Of The Day: What in the world (or galaxy), is that? - WDRB

The best astronomy, space and stargazing books for Christmas 2021.

Did you look up in lockdown? Millions did and have since developed a fascination with the night sky, but stargazing and astronomy isnt easy for beginners. The best way to get more from the night sky and to delve deeper into astronomy is to learn from the experts, many of whom prepared excellent, easy to read books during the various lockdowns.

Here are some of the finest new space, stargazing and astronomy books to delve into this winteror to treat someone else to this Christmas.

The Backyard Astronomer's Guide by Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer

By Terence Dickinson and Alan Dyer

How do go from being a casual stargazer to an accomplished amateur astronomer? You buy this book, thats how. An exhaustive large-format hardback book full of diagrams and color photos, this sky bible first published in 1991 here gets a fresh edition.

A product of the lockdownas many of the books here arethis new version now runs to 416 pages, includes more observing guidance, and has fresh advice on the very latest telescopes, binoculars and smartphones.

As someone who travels to the southern hemisphere I also appreciated the lack of northern hemisphere bias, which blights so many complete guides to the night sky, and the coverage of both lunar and solar eclipses.

Northern Lights: The Definitive Guide To Auroras by Tom Kerss

By Tom Kerss

Have you ever seen the Northern Lights? Would you know what to do if they appeared in front of you? Host of the Star Signs weekly stargazing podcast and founder of Stargazing.London, Tom Kerss guide to the Northern Lights goes way deeper than you might expect.

While packed with basic, practical information about how to see and photograph the Northern Lights this book also includes a wonderful overview of aurora through the centuries. Inside are some gems about how our planets magnetosphere works to just how and why Captain Cook witnessed the aurora in 1770 while sailing south of the equator.

In youre headed to the Arctic Circle then this guide will help to get the most out of your trip.

Atlas Of Solar Eclipses

By Michael Zeiler and Michael E. Bakich (GreatAmericanEclipse.com)

Although originally launched in 2020, that years total solar eclipse was poorly attended due to COVID-19. So if youre getting your travel legs back and thinking about taking new adventures check out this excellent, authoritative and entertaining reference book of all the solar eclipses partial, annular (ring of fire) and the hallowed totalthat will grace our planet through 2045 ... which is going to be abigone for North America.

'The Secret World of Stargazing' by Adrian West.

By Adrian West @VirtualAstro

There are billions of humans on this planet, and only a tiny fraction of us understand and enjoy the night sky. So says Adrian West, better known as @VirtualAstro on Twitter, on the exclusive yet increasingly inclusive hobby thats currently on-trend.

In this accessible and feel-good stargazing guide he majors on how looking up at the night sky is good for mental well-being. A book born out of the pandemic lockdowns, its 14 chapters cover everything from getting started to what to look at each season. It also touches on an obsession of the author on Twitterbright passes of satellites such as the International Space Station (ISS).

Written from the heart but with expert tips, The Secret World of Stargazing acts as a succinct and simple to understand manual for any accidental stargazers who picked up the habit during 2020 and now want to take the next step and learn to navigate and to know the night sky.

Natalie Starkey's new book, Fire and Ice: The Volcanoes of the Solar System.

By Natalie Starkey

Space volcanoes are fascinating. Theyre how a planetary body cools itself down, releasing excess heat into space. For geologists, volcanoes on a planet or moon is evidence that a world is activealive!

But spewing ice? Volcanoes do that? They do on Triton, a moon of Neptune, and on Enceladus at Saturn. Weird Titan at Saturn may even have ice volcanoes that pump out methane.

The first to examine the extra-terrestrial volcanoes of our Solar System, Natalie Starkeys latest is an explosive read in more ways than one that will give you a new perspective on both the planets closest to us and of the darker corners of our Solar System.

Philip's Month-by-Month Stargazing 2022 by Nigel Henbest

By Nigel Henbest

If youre going to be a good stargazer you need to know exactly whats going happen, when, and where youll be able to see it from where you live. You can do a lot of that online, but a much easier way is to read this short, accessible guide to the night sky that for the first time includes information on basic astrophotography and a dark sky map of Britain and Ireland.

So whats going to happen above us in 2022? Highlights include a fabulous conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, a total eclipse of the Moon and a rare occultation of a bright Mars by the Moon.

With each month treated to a summary of highlights, a calendar of events and a handy skychart, this timely guide from Dr. Nigel Henbestwho had been writing the annual Philips guide with the late Dr. Heather Couper for many yearsis an excellent way to prepare your eyes for clear skies.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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Can You Read The Night Sky? Six Of The Best New Space, Stargazing And Astronomy Books For Christmas 2021 - Forbes

Nov 26th 2021

WALT WHITMAN, the greatest male American poet of the 19th century, and Billy Bragg, the self-proclaimed big-nosed bard of Barking, may not at first seem to have much in common. But both have inveighed against interference with the solace, wonder and communion offered by the unspoiled and unmediated night sky. The protagonist of Whitmans When I heard the learn'd astronomer walks out of an alienating lecture on the science of stars and planets. He wanders off by himself

The lovelorn youth of Mr Braggs debut single, A New England, laments the fact that he

Today it is the learnd astronomers who wish someone would care, because they are facing space hardware in unprecedented profusion. The idea of reaching billions of people in places hard to wire into the internet has led to a series of schemes seeking to provide wireless broadband from the sky, and it is in the nature of such schemes that they require inordinate numbers of fairly low-flying satellites. SpaceX, the leader in this new market, already has a shell of 1,584 satellites circling the Earth. Within a few years it wants to have enough shells to make use of 40,000.

Others have plans at least as ambitious. In a decades time thousands of swift artificial stars may be racing through the dawn and dusk, and a significant part of the nights in between. They will probably not, for the most part, be noticeable to the naked eye. But for those observing the cosmos with sophisticated instruments, they will be a substantial obstacle.

Layering the outermost reaches of the atmosphere with a hardwaresphere is a signal achievement. Human enterprise can now mass-produce sophisticated equipment that functions in the harshest environments and lift it to the heavens in bulk. In so doing companies can bring fully connected modernity to people everywhere. Meanwhile smaller constellations will monitor the Earth more closely, more constantly and more fully than ever before, tracking its changes and helping its inhabitants understand what they are doing from a Gods eye point of view.

But all expansions bring externalities, and the number of such satellites is becoming an issue in many ways. It seems bizarre to think of low-Earth orbita quadrillion cubic kilometres of empty space, roughly as large a volume as that of the planet which sits at its centreas being crowded by a population of satellites unlikely to number more than a mere million. But in terms of collision-risk and the sight of the stars that is becoming the case.

Collisions are the deepest concern. They do not just wreck the satellites involved: the debris they create puts other satellites at higher risk, too. There are legitimate fears that after a threshold number of collisions a chain reaction will take off that makes whole classes of orbit unusable. That is why anti-satellite-missile tests like the one conducted by Russia a couple of weeks ago are so reprehensible. The world urgently needs to deal with this, and the related issue of what to do with satellites that are defective or have reached the end of their lives.

One problem is that it is cheaper to let others tend to the orbital commons than pitch in yourself. Another is that anti-satellite weapons used in earnest might well overturn the apple cart. But in the normal run of things, the interests of satellite operators are generally aligned when it comes to keeping low Earth orbit clear enough to be useful. Get the regulations, norms and incentives right and technologies that allow orbits to be cleaned up could find buyers.

In the case of the astronomers clear view of the cosmos things are less straightforward. If humankind has a common cultural heritage of any sort at all, the night sky must surely form part of it. But no authority is in a position to protect it as such, and compensating astronomersor for that matter humans at largefor the satellites that get in their way feels more like a piece of satire than a policy proposal. The interests of astronomers and satellite-owners are incommensurate, and there is no overarching authority to decide between them. So facts in the sky are likely to count for everything.

The two sides are trying to minimise the problem. Astronomers are looking at new ways to observe; satellite designers at ways of making their creations less bright. But each side could do more.

Professional astronomers need to reconsider the degree to which their field, and particularly the space-based bits of it, is dominated by the most expensive telescopes money can buy. Launching things into space is cheaper than it used to be, and it is set to get cheaper still; satellite technology, as the constellations show, has come on in leaps and bounds.

That makes it time for a serious attempt to break the interlocking feedback cycles through which space-science missions, having become expensive, need to have any associated risks minimised, which makes them more expensive. That leads them to crowd out smaller missions, which means they need to serve more parts of the community which, again, makes them more expensive. That means their budget has to be spread over a longer period of time; that too makes them more expensive.

Those are the sort of dynamics which produce a $10bn marvel like the James Webb Space Telescope, a scientific instrument which has cost as much as a nuclear aircraft-carrier. Is it better to spend such a sum on a unique capability for observing the cosmos than on yet another war machine? Quite possibly. Must new views of space cost quite that much? Very probably not.

Finding ways to do astronomy more cheaply in space would allow professional observations to be made above the fray, as it were. But the new satellite constellations would still frustrate amateurs, and quite possibly those who simply stop in their tracks on a clear night to look up and wonder. Here the satellite companies can do something to make amends. For most people satellites are not the only or greatest constraint on the observability of the universe. Street lighting and other forms of light pollution do more harm.

Satellite companies should encourage and subsidise the local initiatives to reduce light pollution that can be found all over the world. If so, they might find that such deeds might buy them good will. And if making the sky easier to appreciate in all its glory also means that people become more aware of your satellites, they may well be more inclined to forgive you for it.

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Why the nights grow less dark, and what to do about it - The Economist

It's hard to grasp how big galaxies are.

If you pointed a flashlight at the Milky Way's core you'd have to wait nearly 26,000 years for the light the fastest thing in the Universe! to get there. And we're not even halfway out to the edge of the galaxy; the flat circular spiral-armed disk of the Milky Way is fully 120,000 light years across.

Galaxies are immense.

So when I say galaxy clusters are huge, believe me. They are millions of light years across, and can contain hundreds of galaxies like our own and thousands in total (including the smaller ones).

But where do clusters come from? We think they form huge, condensing out of truly vast clouds of gas that form along a dark matter scaffold in the Universe that can be hundreds of millions of light years long. As they form they're technically protoclusters. The member galaxies form along with them, some getting an early start and growing rapidly.

This was all fairly theoretical until recently, when astronomers started finding protoclusters (and even protosuperclusters, still-forming clusters of clusters) in the sky. The European Space Agency mission Planck, which observed the entire sky in long wavelengths of light, found a couple of thousand candidate galaxy protoclusters, incredibly. One such protocluster is called PHz G237.01+42.50, and astronomers just took a much closer look at it to see what it's doing.

It was discovered in Planck data; young galaxies that are rapidly making stars shine brightly at the wavelengths Planck saw. In a protocluster there will be lots of these kinds of galaxies close together in the sky, so the astronomers looked for clumps bright blobs in the Planck data, and found PHz G237.01+42.50. It's also in a part of the sky that was intensely observed as part of a project called the Cosmic Evolution Survey that used a fleet of different observatories to investigate galaxy behavior across the electromagnetic spectrum.

The protocluster PHz G237.01+42.50 has enough galaxies in it far enough along in their formation process to identify them and the astronomers were able to ID 31 in total. These all lie about 10.7 billion light years from Earth, so we see them as they were when the Universe was a bit less than three billion years old. In other words, young, and still forming.

The total mass they find for the system is daunting: enough to make about 500 trillion stars like the Sun! As crushing at that seems on a human scale, that's about typical for a decent-sized galaxy cluster.

It's not clear how many stars are currently being made in all the galaxies forming there, but it's something between 4,000 and 10,000 times the mass of the Sun every year. That's well over a thousand times the starbirth rate of the Milky Way, but again that's not too surprising. We're talking a lot of galaxies there, and in the early Universe galaxies cranked out stars at far higher rates than they tend to today.

Another thing they found is that there appear to be two subprotoclusters here, smaller forming clusters likely connected, one about 10.65 and the other about 10.7 billion light years from us. That's a difference of 50 million light years, give or take, which is close enough that they might be physically connected. The nearest extant cluster to the Milky Way is the Virgo Cluster, for example, which is roughly 50-60 million light years away from us, and we're considered to be more or less on the most distant suburbs of it.

Which brings up a point. The clusters that are relatively close to us are easier to study than distant ones, but we see them more or less as they are now, long after they formed. We can learn a lot about them, but it's hard to know if what we're seeing is due to how they formed, or things that happened after. The Virgo Cluster has the ridiculously beefy galaxy M87 in its center that's the one with the supermassive black hole we got images of in 2019. Did it grow huge first then fall to the center, or did it form there and then ate everything that fell into the cluster core?

It's also an active galaxy: Material like gas and dust from the galaxy are falling into its center and getting gobbled down by the black hole. But as it falls down it gets incredibly hot and shines so brightly it can actually be brighter than all the stars in the galaxy combined. We call those active galaxies. Do those tend to be closer to the cluster core, and if so do they become active later, or are they active because they're in the core?

With PHz G237.01+42.50 they find about 20% of the galaxies are active, and the core of the cluster has a higher percentage of active galaxies and ones with higher star-forming rates than the cluster overall. That's very interesting. It strongly implies that environmental conditions are important in galaxy growth and in making these galaxies what they are.

They also compared PHz G237.01+42.50 to other protoclusters at the same distance from us and found it to be fairly typical in many ways, including how rapidly stars are forming in its citizen galaxies and the masses of those galaxies. On the other hand, they also find that the protoclusters have different percentages of galaxies in them that are normal star-forming galaxies, ones that are starbursts (rapidly forming stars), and ones that are quenched (not forming stars much at all). Again this implies that environmental conditions in young clusters may dictate how galaxies grow and evolve.

You can think of stars as the building blocks of galaxies, but galaxies are the building blocks of the Universe. For all that there are still many mysteries about them to solve, including how they're born and how that's affected by where they're born. The more protoclusters we can find and examine, the better we may be able to unravel the tangled history of our own Milky Way, too.

A lesson of astronomy: Looking outward is looking inward. We examine the Universe to better understand ourselves. It's poetic, and it's a noble endeavor.

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Astronomers spot the construction site for a galactic supercity - SYFY WIRE

As the first woman in the role, Catherine Heymans wants to bring astronomy and science to the masses.

Earlier this year, astrophysicist Catherine Heymans became the first woman to be appointed astronomer royal for Scotland since the position was created almost 200 years ago.

She is the 11th person to hold the role after it became vacant in 2019 following the death of John Campbell Brown, who held the position since 1995.

However, while the title lasts a lifetime, Heymans doesnt plan on holding onto it for all that time.

I think this title gives me immense opportunity to go out there and tell people about astronomy and what we do, but at some point, Ill run out of energy.

She said while there can sometimes be an elitist idea of holding onto prestigious titles, shes more focused on using it to do the work she wants to do and then letting the title go to the next person.

There are so many big questions I want to answer [and] Ive got a big project that I want to do to get telescopes installed in all our outdoor centres. Once Ive got that done, then I will pass this very sparkly tiara onto someone else.

Originally, the position was linked to the royal observatories in the UK. Up until 1995, the astronomer royal for Scotland was the title of the director of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. Since then, it has become an honorary title which, in Heymans words, means she gets to decide what exactly the role is.

Its a really great opportunity to be able to share with everyone just how much astronomy were doing in Scotland, both professional astronomy and amateur astronomy, she said.

My local amateur astronomy group, their membership has grown by 30pc during lockdown.

Not only is Heymans the first woman in the role for Scotland, she is also the first woman to be appointed as astronomer royal in the whole of the UK.

Coming from an all girls school as a child, she had no idea about the stereotype that science wasnt for girls because she was taught by women and surrounded by other young girls.

However, when she got to university, she didnt have a single woman lecturer and there were only six women in a class of 60. It wasnt until I started my PhD that I actually met a female physicist, which is crazy.

Now, Heymans is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh and said she has seen the gender balance improve, with between 25pc and 33pc women coming into science courses.

I dont see us ever getting to 50pc at the current rate that were going. Theres something that were doing wrong and theres no single answer. If there was a single answer, we would have fixed it by now. But I think part of the problem is its really culturally ingrained in us that science is for boffins and science is really difficult and that maybe its not a job for girls, she said.

For this reason, Heymans wants to use her astronomer royal title to show that science is for everyone, no matter who you are and that its also for girls.

She said even now, she sees the cultural assumptions people make about what a senior STEM professional might look like.

Having been invited to be in the audience for the Richard Osmans House of Games quiz show, contestants were asked to find someone in the audience who could answer an astronomy question.

They were told the astronomer royal for Scotland was in the audience. So they went around trying [to find] an old man with a white beard, young man, then an old woman with white hair, progress!

Eventually it did narrow down to me but it just showed that your standard idea of what is an astronomer? is an old man with a white beard.

Heymans said another common misconception about astronomy is that its a solitary job, with images of people on their own with a single telescope coming to mind.

I think people think that science is often working away on your own and its absolutely not at all, its all big teams now. Theres such big questions that you cant answer them on your own.

It was clear from speaking to Heymans that shes incredibly passionate about every aspect of her career, from bringing science to the wider public to encouraging young woman into STEM.

But nothing made her light up more than when she was talking about astronomy. I think astronomy is one of the easiest ways get people into science because its so immediate, you just go out at night and its up there, she said. [Things like] black holes, can really capture your imagination, this idea of this infinite mass consuming everything that comes close to it.

What I love about it is you can take these crazy, awesome things that are happening out in the universe and then use fundamental physics and maths to explain it.

In terms of what most excites her in particular, she said she loves watching the seeds from big questions she and others have been trying to answer for years, such as what dark matter is, start to blossom 20 years later with advances in technology and major international projects.

I love that whole chain of going from a big question to an idea of how to solve it, building the technology, the engineering to put the equipment together that you need to conduct that experiment, and then the massive data analysis that follows, she said.

One of the fun things I do is I question Einsteins theory of gravity itself. So one way you can explain whats going on out in the universe is that maybe Einsteins theory of gravity is wrong.

I havent proved him wrong yet, she said. But thats just a fun thing to do, to skip up the hill to the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh just thinking: Will we prove Einstein wrong today? Probably not.

Dont miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for theDaily Brief, Silicon Republics digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

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Meet the first woman appointed as astronomer royal for Scotland - Siliconrepublic.com

By Mike Cook

You can see the rings! a boy said Saturday night, Nov. 13, as he viewed the planet Saturn through a telescope set up on Plaza de Las Cruces by the Astronomical Society of Las Cruces (ASLC).

Society members conduct public telescope viewings in free monthly gatherings, either in Las Cruces or at Leasburg Dam State Park, said ASLC President Ed Montes, who retired to Las Cruces in 2013 and is a popular actor in local theater. Hes been stargazing most of his life, since first looking at a comet with his great-grandmother in Texas decades ago.

ASLC is celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2021, Montes said. It was founded by a group that included astronomer Clyde Tombaugh (1906-97), the discoverer of Pluto, and a beloved Las Cruces icon.

On Nov. 13, ASLC members had telescopes of various diameters set up to view Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and the moon. They invited anyone walking by on the plaza or walking or driving along Main Street to take a look.

Through a partnership with New Mexico State University and the State Parks Division of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, ASLC maintains a 16-inch telescope at its observatory at Leesburg Dam, less than a 30-minute drive north of Las Cruces. The telescope is on permanent loan from the NMSU Astronomy Department, which donated it to ASLC in 2007, Montes said.

Las Cruces and Leesburg Dam are about the same altitude, Montes said, but the state park has much less light pollution than the city.

As part of its partnership agreement, the society reaches out to include as many members of the public as possible in viewing stars, planets, the Milky Way, nebula, asteroids and other astrological phenomena.

The telescopes on Plaza de Las Cruces offered amazing views of the two gas giants, Jupiter (nearly 460 million miles from earth) and Saturn (almost a billion miles from Earth), as well as much closer neighbors Venus (a little more than 50 million miles away) and Earths own moon (almost 239,000 miles from earth). Photos through telescopes were even possible.

Public viewings

ASLC has monthly public viewings, which begin about sunset.

The dates of viewings in Las Cruces are Saturdays, Dec. 11, 2021; and in 2022: Jan. 8, Feb. 12, March 12 and April 9; and at Leesburg Dam State Park, Saturdays, Nov. 27, 2021; and in 2022: Jan. 29, Feb. 26, March 26 and April 23.

You can also request a star party.

Visit https://aslc-nm.org/ for more information and for the locations of and directions to upcoming viewings. The website also shows the current months sky map and some very interesting science, including an astronomical glossary.

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Local astronomical society celebrating 70 years of bringing the universe to star gazers - Las Cruces Bulletin

Professor Marius Ionescu; Department of Mathematics, United States Naval Academy

Given a locally compact groupoid G and a locally compactabelian group bundle p_A G^(0), an extension of A is a locally compact groupoid such that ^(0)= G^(0)together with maps i :A and p : G such that i is a homeomorphism onto its range, p is continuous and open, i and p restricted toG^(0) are the identity. Following earlier work by Kumjian and Tu, we prove that the collection of proper isomorphism classes of compatible extensions form an abelian group. We present in detail the pushout constructions of extensions of groupoids following previous work by Kumjian. We describe how the T-groupoid of an extension is a particular example of the pushout construction. For the main examples, we specialize to extensions by 2 cocycles and prove that the pushout of such an extension is an extension by a cocycle as well. In particular, we desctib e the pushout of an extension by a normalized ech cocycle with values in a locally compact abelian group. This presentation is based on work with Alex Kumjian, Jean Renault, Aidan Sims, and Dana Williams

Operator Theory309 Van 1:30deparMeeting ID: 929 0186 1177

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Operator Theory - Marius Ionescu | Physics and Astronomy | The University of Iowa - Iowa Now

When Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell stumbled on something new during her PhD studies at Cambridge University, she was about to make what the Royal Society called one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 20th century.

The strange bit of scruff she noticed in the data coming from the radio telescope she helped construct in a field outside Cambridge in 1967 while studying interplanetary scintillation of compact radio sources, was a radio pulsar.

Pulsars are small pulsating radio stars, which are only about 10 miles across, and very dense because theyre formed when stars catastrophically explode, she explains. Their beam can be likened to that of a lighthouse beam, and when it shines on a radio telescope, it can pick up a pulse. The discovery made her a star, despite missing out on a Nobel prize.

Born in Lurgan, Co Armagh, Bell was interested in science after reading an astronomy book her father had taken out of the library. Growing up in a Quaker household, she was raised to believe she had as much right to an education as anyone else and decided to pursue science early on, even though very few girls did so at the time.

Bell moved to York in the UK to attend a Quaker boarding school at the age of 13, where she took science subjects. After graduation, she attended the University of Glasgow, gaining a degree in physics in 1965 before getting accepted to Cambridge Universitys New Hall to study quasars.

A luminous active galactic nucleus, quasars are powered by supermassive black holes, with mass ranging from millions to tens of billions times the mass of the sun. Bell was responsible for operating the telescope she helped build, and analysing its data. This was before computers, so there was over 30 meters of paper to be looked at by hand every day.

After completing her PhD, Bell got married and left Cambridge to raise her son and travel with her then husband around the UK, where his career took him.

She held a junior teaching fellowship at the University of Southampton, where she developed and calibrated a 1-10 million electron volt gamma ray telescope, before taking a research position teaching x-ray astronomy at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in London.

In 1974, the discovery of radio pulsars earned her supervisor Anthony Hewish a Nobel Prize. For many, the omission appeared to be due to her gender, because at the time women were an anomaly in physics and astrophysics, but Bell attributed it to the fact that she was a PhD student at the time of the discovery in 1967 at the University of Cambridge.

There is a committee who decides who gets the Nobel prize. Until then, they had never considered astronomy as physics.

She says there were upsides to not winning the coveted award. Once you win a Nobel prize, you wont get any other prize, because others feel they wont match up, but if you dont, youll get lots of other prizes.

She received the Oppenheimer Prize for outstanding contributions to the theoretical natural sciences in 1978, the Beatrice M Tinsley Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1987, the Herschel Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 1989, while also winning the Michelson Medal and being knighted by the Queen in 2019.

Bell served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004, and as president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 to October 2010.

In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and gave the entirety of the 2.3 million prize money to help female, minority and refugee students seeking to become physics researchers. The scheme, administered by the Institute of Physics became known as the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship fund.

In 2021, she was awarded the Copley Medal, only the second female to ever win it after Dorothy Hodgkin won it in 1976. Interestingly, she was a Quaker too, she says. She is currently a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford where she studies neutron stars, and a fellow of Mansfield College.

About her Irish roots, Bell says; Im an honorary member of the Royal Dublin Society and come over for vacations. My family are from Dublin, and I really enjoyed visiting Ireland this past summer. A glorious day in Howth Head was a highlight.

When asked about the final frontier of space knowledge earth-like planets, Bell says there is progress. We are finding a lot of planets around stars, and are trying to see if they support life, she says.

Currently residing in Oxford, where she is still lectures, she says the universe still throws out more questions than answers. The pulsars she discovered in 1967, are used as proposed signposts for interstellar navigation and a map, which could direct aliens towards earth. Perhaps, in the decades to come, they could not just help scientists detect gravitational waves, but also communicate with alien lifeforms.

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The Armagh woman who made one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of 20th century - The Irish Times