Category Archives: Astronomy

Despite a dense population and seemingly denser traffic, Northern Virginia has its fair share of prime stargazing spots, many of which host regular educational classes and programs. Photo courtesy of Allexxandarx/Adobe Stock

For both amateur and seasoned astronomers, there are plenty of ways to get lost looking into space in D.C., like the National Air and Space Museumand farther out at Shenandoah National Park and Richmonds Virginia Living Museum. But despite a dense population and seemingly denser traffic, Northern Virginia also has its fair share of prime stargazing spots, many of which host regular classes and programs to grow a fledgling hobby and learn more about the sky above.

Burke Lake Park

Burke Lake Parks open fields lend themselves well to stargazing, and on Jan. 21, the parks resident astronomical naturalist will lead acampfirewith a discussionabout stargazing. There, you can learn more about constellations and try outprovided telescopes. //7315 Ox Road, Fairfax Station

C.M. Crockett Park

C.M. Crockett Parks expansive open field is an ideal location to spot constellations, planets, star clusters and galaxies. The Northern Virginia Astronomy Club holds monthly public viewings, and club members and nonmembers of all experience levels are welcome. The next viewing will take place Jan. 28. // 10066 Rogues Road, Midland

David M. Brown Planetarium

Located at the Arlington Schools Education Center, the David M. Brown Planetarium hosts itsStars Tonightprogram on the first Monday of every month at 7:30 p.m. Regular attendeescan track changes in the solar system. //1426 N. Quincy St., Arlington

GMU Observatory

While George Mason Universitys observatory is typically reserved for students, it frequently hosts its Evening Under the Stars program, where participants can look through the schools primary telescope. //George Mason University College of Science: 10401 York River Road, Fairfax

Meadowkirk at Delta Farm

Meadowkirks Brinton Observatory, also partnered with the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club, is an ideal spot check out the night sky, featuring a number of telescopes and regular astronomy programs. There are programs geared toward both children and more experienced stargazers that explore the moon and planets, the greater solar system and constellations and deep space. //38012 Delta Farm Lane, Middleburg

Observatory Park at Turner Farm

Out in Great Falls, you can see the stars from one of the regions darkest locations, and even better, Turner Farmrecently opened a new roll-top observatory that offers programs and equipment for optimal viewing. The Analemma Society helms educational programming at the park, including weekly Fridayobserving sessionsfrom 7:30-9:30 p.m. Participants who stop by this month might just be able to seeVenus, the Andromeda galaxy and the Orion nebula. // 925 Springvale Road, Great Falls

Sky Meadows State Park

Sky Meadows offers a dedicated observing fieldnear the Bleak Hill House for Northern Virginia Astronomy Club members as well as nonmembers, and the parkregularly partners with the National Air and Space Museum for events. // 11012 Edmonds Lane, Delaplane

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Best stargazing spots in Northern Virginia

As if the gas giant wasnt impressive enough, Jupiters already long list of moons has just grown by two.

While on the hunt for Planet X, DTM staff scientist Scott Sheppard, along with David Tholen from the University of Hawaii and Chadwick Trujillo from Northern Arizona University, decided to point their telescopes toward Jupiter. From there, the team could study Jupiter in the foreground while continuing their search for Planet X in the background.

While making those observations, they discovered many lost moons in addition to two new, mile-wide moons theyre calling S/2016 J 1 and S/2017 J 1. The new moons lie about 13 million miles (21 million kilometers) and 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) from Jupiter.

Several of the moons Sheppards team found qualify as lost moons - despite their discovery back in 2003, there was not enough information to define their exact orbits, so astronomers lost track of them as they circled Jupiter. Some moons have been found since that time, but at the beginning of 2016, 14 were still considered lost.

While observing, Sheppard and his team added their data from 2016-2017 to data from 2003 and found five of those lost moons. They will continue observing for another year to see if they can identify the rest of the lost moons; they may find more new moons, too.

In the meantime, after checking their 2016-2017 data against images taken in 2003, the team confirmed that S/2016 J 1 and S/2017 J 1 are previously undiscovered moons, bringing the number of Jupiters moons up to 69.

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Jupiter has two new moons - Astronomy Magazine

Forbes

The Future Of Astronomy: Thousands Of Radio Telescopes That Can See Beyond The Stars Forbes By building bigger telescopes, going to space, and looking from ultraviolet to visible to infrared wavelengths, we can view stars and galaxies as far back as stars and galaxies go. But for millions of years in the Universe, there were no stars, no ...

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The Future Of Astronomy: Thousands Of Radio Telescopes That Can See Beyond The Stars - Forbes

August 21 is the Great American Eclipse the first total solar eclipse in American history exclusive to the US. Elsewhere on Earth, though, a total solar eclipse occurs roughly every 18 months. But what about other planets? Can they happen there?

Mercury No. In a total solar eclipse, a moon slides between a planet and its sun, blocking the suns light and casting a shadow on the world below. But Mercury doesnt have a moon, making eclipses there impossible.

Venus No. Venus doesnt have a moon either. But that doesnt mean there arent eclipses. Venus has planetary eclipses or transits caused by Mercury orbiting between Venus and the Sun. Earth experiences transits, too, every time Mercury or Venus pass between the Sun and Earth. But theyre rare. Mercury and Venus transit Earth 8 years apart, then it takes over a century for the cycle to start over. The next planetary eclipse here on Earth is December 11, 2117.

Mars No. Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, so solar eclipses are totally possible they just arent total. Theyre annular. Just like a total solar eclipse, the moon passes between its planet and the Sun, covering the Suns center. But when a moons too far from the planet to cover the Sun or as with Phobos and Deimos too small, the rest of the Sun sticks out around the sides. See one for yourself in this video Curiosity Rover took on Mars September 13, 2012:

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Total eclipse of a planet - Astronomy Magazine

Galaxies can be used as tracers for numerous characteristics of the universe, including the cosmic web of hydrogen gas that connects galaxies and follows the distribution of dark matter filaments throughout the cosmos. Looking at where galaxies sit sheds light on these otherwise invisible structures, while also providing clues about the amount of mass in galaxies and how they influence their neighbors over time. Now, astronomers have traced the alignment of massive galaxies back 10 billion years, showing these objects have been in tune with their environment since the universe was just one-third its current age.

The work was led by Lowell Observatory astronomer Michael West, who together with his collaborators used Hubble Space Telescope images of 65 galaxy clusters located billions of light-years away to study the orientation of the massive elliptical galaxies in the centers of these clusters. What they found suggests that the biggest, brightest galaxies in galaxy clusters have been heavily influenced by their unique environment since very early times. The study appears in Nature Astronomy online today.

Galaxy clusters present a very different environment from the field, which is an astronomers term for the majority of the sky, which shows no preferential structure or clustering of galaxies. Inside galaxy clusters, individual galaxies are subjected to intense gravity, a hot intracluster medium of gas, and many more flybys between neighboring galaxies than could ever occur in the less dense field. And while galaxies in the field tend to be oriented any which way, galaxies in clusters are different. The massive galaxies at the centers of clusters show preferential alignment with their neighbors, and astronomers are still looking to find out why.

One reason for this alignment could be that over time, gravity simply tends to orient large galaxies in the same direction as their neighbors. Alternatively, because large galaxies grow by absorbing smaller galaxies, these smaller galaxies could impart orientation on the galaxies that eat them due to the progenitors preferred orientation along the cosmic web.

The results of Wests study dont rule out either scenario, but they do help constrain the alignment by showing that it occurs very early on in galaxy evolution. Its an important new piece of the puzzle, said West in a press release, because it says that whatever caused these alignments happened early.

Whats next? Wests group plans to push the envelope further by trying to observe even more distant galaxies. Despite the precision achievable with Hubble, however, this will be challenging, as even massive galaxies appear fainter and smaller as the distance between Earth and these clusters grows. But such observations at the earliest epochs may help astronomers finally determine the reason for this preferred orientation, helping to complete our picture of early galaxy evolution.

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Galaxies are locked in place by their surroundings - Astronomy Magazine

This helpful new tool may give you a better idea of where to go to watch the total solar eclipse.

The University of California, Berkeley teamed up with Google to create the Eclipse Megamovie Project, a new simulator that can show what the eclipse will look like from any location, including along the path of totality, which stretches across 11 states and goes up to 72 miles wide.

All you have to do is go to the website, enter the zip code or city you want to see, and youll receive an animation of the Sun in the sky over a three-hour time span. Youll see whether you will stand in the path of totality on eclipse day, or alternatively how much of the Sun will disappear during the partial eclipse visible from other locations.

Dan Zevin, who is on the team leading the project at UC Berkeleys Space Sciences Laboratory, said that while there are other eclipse simulators out there, this one is unique.

There are lots of online animations of the 2017 eclipse, but you cant use them like ours to get a sense of the full experience, including your surroundings, Zevin said in a press release. Our simulation is closer to what one might experience in a planetarium show.

Get a better idea of what the eclipse will look like in your hometown or along the path of totality on August 21, 2017, at this link.

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Get a sneak peak of August's total solar eclipse - Astronomy Magazine

Artist's illustration of Deep Space Industries' Harvestor-class spacecraft for asteroid mining.

NEW YORK Smithsonian astrophysicist Martin Elvis would like to see astronomers take on a crucial role for future asteroid mining: as astronomical prospectors scoping out the next big catch.

Elvis, a researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, discussed his dream for applied astronomy June 4 here at the Dawn of Private Space Science Symposium. Efficient asteroid mining would jump-start a space economy and bring down costs for exploration and space science, guiding humans into a modern space age, he said.

"My basic goal is just to revolutionize our exploration of the solar system, of the universe," Elvis said at the conference. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)]

Right now, he said, spaceflight and space science is unsustainably expensive. But asteroid mining could play a critical role in making those endeavors doable on a smaller budget, as private companies like SpaceX have decreased the launch cost per pound of payload.

But asteroid mining will face a critical problem, Elvis said: How to choose which asteroids will be worth the trip. And astronomers can play a crucial role in that determination, he said.

"The problem with asteroids is not many of them are valuable. You've got to find the right ones," he said. "We want to throw away that gray, stony stuff and deal with the carbonaceous or metallic ones, depending on whether you're looking for water or precious metals like platinum and palladium. So, this is where we [astronomers] come in."

As an example, Elvis pointed to the twin Magellan 6.5-meter telescopes in Chile. Professional astronomers could use telescopes of that size to characterize a faint asteroid in about 1-2 minutes. Eighty-five percent of asteroids could be thrown out based just on their color, he said, and the remaining 15 percent would be good prospects for sending small, exploratory probes using the data gathered about the objects' orbits and sizes.

Even a few nights per year would allow for the characterization of about 300 such objects, he said. And as larger telescopes come online, like the European Extremely Large Telescope and the Giant Magellan Telescope, the midsize telescopes could become more accessible for even more space-mining projects, he said.

Asteroids are fascinating for lots of reasons. They contain a variety of valuable resources and slam into our planet on a regular basis, occasionally snuffing out most of Earth's lifeforms. How much do you know about space rocks?

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Asteroid Basics: A Space Rock Quiz

Asteroids are fascinating for lots of reasons. They contain a variety of valuable resources and slam into our planet on a regular basis, occasionally snuffing out most of Earth's lifeforms. How much do you know about space rocks?

"This means astronomers can turn out to be useful again [like] what [they] used to be, back in the days of navigation," he said. Similar to modern-day mining on Earth, there could be a multistep process of prospecting remotely "you don't just go straight to start digging rocks" before making a trip, Elvis added.

Such a process could cut asteroid prospecting costs by a factor of 10, he said. That would allow asteroid mining to flourish, lowering the cost commercially to put people and science in space.

On Earth, most of the precious metals, like platinum and palladium, are located 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) down, but they can come much nearer to the surface on asteroids. Those metals have dissolved in iron and were drawn to the center of the Earth, Elvis said, and the same thing happened on asteroids but the asteroids were then smashed up enough that it made the precious metals much more accessible. (Comets also contain valuable resources, especially water, Elvis said, but the energy needed to reach those fast-moving bodies makes them less worth the cost to explore.)

So far, Elvis has talked to the asteroid-mining companies Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, but neither company initially believed that this kind of remote prospecting would be necessary, he said.

"Both of them are dominated by engineers who are very good at building small spacecraft, and I'm sure they will succeed at building interplanetary cubesat-scale spacecraft for prospecting at the asteroid, but they were initially unbelieving of what I just told you," Elvis said.

They might come around, though, he added. "One of the companies did eventually realize that this was a necessary precursor to their sending out satellites," he said. "The other still isn't interested."

Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Mining the Heavens: Astronomers Could Spot Asteroid Prospects - Space.com

(Source: SKA Africa)

An ambitious astronomy effort designed to peer back to the origins of the universe and map the formation of galaxies is underpinned by an emerging memory technology that seeks to move computing resources closer to huge astronomy data sets.

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is an international initiative to build the world's largest radio telescope. A "precursor project" in the South African desert called MeerKAT consists of 64 44-foot "receptor" satellite dishes. The array gathers and assembles faint radio signals used to create images of distant galaxies.

Once combined with other sites, SKA would be capable of peering back further in time than any other Earth-based observatory. As with most advanced science projects, SKA presents unprecedented data processing challenges. With daily data volumes reaching 1 exabyte, "The data volume is becoming overwhelming," astronomer Simon Ratcliffe noted during a webcast this week.

In response, Micron Technology Inc. (NASDAQ: MU) has come up with a processing platform for handling the growing data bottleneck called the Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC). The memory specialist combined its fast logic process technology with new DRAM designs to boost badly needed bandwidth in its high-density memory system.

Steve Pawlowski, Micron's vice president of advanced computing, claimed its memory platform delivers as much as a 15-fold increase in bandwidth, a capability that addresses next-generation networking and exascale computing requirements.

Applications such as SKA demonstrate "the ability to put [computing] at the edge" to access the most relevant data, Pawlowski added.

The radio telescope array uses a front-end processor to convert faint analog radio signals to digital. Those signals are then processed using FPGAs. Memory resources needed to make sense of all that data can be distributed using relatively simple algorithms, according to Francois Kapp, a systems engineer at SKA South Africa. The challenge, Kapp noted, is operating the array around the clock along with the "increasing depth and width of memory" requirements. "You can't just add more memory to increase the bandwidth, " he noted, especially as FPGAs move to faster interfaces.

Hence, the SKA project is wringing out Micron's HMC approach as it maps the universe and seeks to determine how galaxies were formed. The resulting daily haul of data underscores what Jim Adams, former NASA deputy chief scientist, called "Big Science."

The exascale computing requirements of projects such as SKA exceed those of previous planetary missions such as the 2015 New Horizon fly-by of Pluto. Adams said it took NASA investigators a year to download all the data collected by New Horizon.

The technical challenges are similar for earth-bound observatories. "Astronomy is becoming data science," Ratcliffe added.

Micron positions its memory platform as a "compute building block" designed to provide more bandwidth between memory and computing resources while placing processing horsepower as close as possible to data so researchers can access relevant information.

Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube moves processing power closer to astronomy data. (Source: Micron Technology)

Meanwhile, university researchers at the University of Heidelberg are attempting to accelerate adoption of new memory approaches like Micron's through open-source development of configurable HMC controller that would serve as a memory interface.

Research Juri Schmidt noted that the German university's network-attached memory scheme was another step toward pushing memory close to data by reducing the amount of data movement.

Micron's Pawlowski noted that the current version of the memory platform is being used to sort and organize SKA data as another way to reduce data movement. The chipmaker is also investigating how to incorporate more logic functionality, including the use of machine learning to train new analytics models.

Computing, memory and, eventually, cloud storage could be combined with Micron's low-power process technology for energy efficient high-performance computing. While the company for now doesn't view HMC as an all-purpose platform, it would be suited to specific applications such as SKA, Pawlowski noted.

The astronomy initiative will provide a major test for exascale computing since, according to Adams, SKA "is a time machine," able to look back just beyond the re-ionization period after the Big Bang when galaxies began to form.

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 25 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as Executive Editor for Electronic Engineering Times.

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Data-Driven Astronomy Effort Gets Memory Boost - EnterpriseTech

Sometimes, its our closest neighbors that are the most difficult to spy on. Case in point: The Luhman 16 AB system, which is the third-closest stellar system to our Sun, yet was not discovered until 2013. After three years of subsequent monitoring, a stack of 12 images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has confirmed that the system is composed of two brown dwarfs and no third companion, as was originally suspected.

A team of astronomers led by Luigi Bedin watched the two visible stars, Luhman 16 A and Luhman 16 B, over the course of three years between August 22, 2014, and October 4, 2016. During this time, HST has imaged the system 12 times (with a thirteenth proposed visit in August 2018). Using these images, they were able to determine several orbital parameters of the stars, as well as more accurately measure their distance and search for any potential exoplanets in the system. Their results have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Bedin and his team used their sequence of Hubble images to watch the two brown dwarfs dance across the sky. In particular, they were looking for a third potential body in the system, such as a large exoplanet, which had been indicated by the stars motion in previous observations with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope. However, according to Bedins group, the new Hubble measurements rule out the presence of a third body in the system, all the way down to planets of Neptunes mass with a period between one and two years. Thus, if the system does harbor exoplanets, they must be smaller than Neptune and take longer than one to two Earth years to circle their sun.

Brown dwarfs are often called failed stars because they are too small to sustain the fusion processes that create energy inside stars. While these bodies can sometimes fuse a hydrogen isotope known as deuterium, even this phase doesnt last very long, relatively speaking, leaving the star to essentially cool off over cosmic time and grow dark.

However, astronomers know that there are many more low-mass objects in the universe than high-mass ones. Thus, because of their increased number, these lower-mass objects are an extremely fertile place to look for exoplanets.

Luhman A and B circle each other once every two to four decades, with a distance between them of about 3 astronomical units (three times the distance between the Sun and Earth). The system itself is located within about 2 parsecs of the Sun, or 6.5 light-years. Only the Alpha Centauri system and Barnard's Star are closer.

Because the Luhman 16 AB system is so close to the Sun, its the perfect place to study brown dwarfs, which are hard to see because theyre both small and dim, up close. Bedins team plans to continue their study of the stars to both improve the precision of their measured orbital parameters and to search for ever-smaller, Earth-sized exoplanets in the system.

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Hubble spies on nearby brown dwarfs - Astronomy Magazine

Investigating how languages emerge and evolve. Using climate-change data to predict dust storms and bacterial meningitis outbreaks in Northern Africa. Understanding whether age-related diseases may stem from a common driver. Determining whether the presence of oxygen can be used to predict life on distant exoplanets.

Harvard scientists are known for pushing boundaries, but the projects funded through the 2017 Star Family Challenge for Promising Scientific Research are poised to take that reputation to new heights.

Created through a gift from James A. Star 83, the annual challenge funds high-risk, high-reward research that might not receive funding through other programs.

I want to salute the winners of the 2017 Star Family Challenge, Star said. This is a wonderful set of projects, and I look forward to hearing about them. I also want to thank Professor Randy Buckner and his committee for taking over from [former chairman] Doug Melton and moving the challenge forward.

As part of the program, the faculty members selected for the awards Jesse Snedeker, Elsie Sunderland, Caroline Buckee, Amy Wagers, and Robin Wordsworth made short presentations on their work to a standing-room-only crowd in the Faculty Room of University Hall.

We live in a time in which the funding of science faces threats, said Buckner, a professor of psychology and of neuroscience. It is unlikely the funding of science is going to become more risk-taking, more imaginative, or more centered on the blue-sky projects which excite so many people here today.

The need for the type of funding the Star Family Foundation is providing is going to become ever more critical, he continued. Your support means a very great deal.

Jesse Snedeker

Language is ubiquitous, said Snedeker, a professor of psychology, describing her project. Everywhere in the world you will find people talking to one another. These languages have many properties in common they all use nouns and verbs, they all have grammatical rules, and all languages are acquired by young children over a very short period. But there is also remarkable diversity of language they can vary in their words, in the specific grammatical structures that they allow, and in their sounds.

The basic question Snedeker hopes to address is one that has long been at the center of psychological research: Where does language come from?

Its an extremely difficult problem, she noted, because while the first humans left Africa at least 60,000 years ago, written records of language begin only about 5,000 years ago. What researchers can examine are the languages created by deaf communities.

Working with the deaf community in Nicaragua, Snedeker and colleagues plan to collect data on shared words, grammatical rules, and social networks among students from the 1970s through the 1990s with the goal of understanding how language changed over time.

What other researchers have discovered is that the first cohort those students that came into the schools in the 70s had shared signs for certain words and ordered narratives, but they do not reliably mark which argument is the subject and which is the object with either word order, like English, or case marking, like Russian or Turkish, Snedeker said. But by the time the later cohorts come in, they use verbal inflection about 50 percent of the time, and subject, object, verb word order the rest of the time.

This rapid pattern of evolution of language raises some interesting questions, Snedeker added. The first were going to be asking is: Why havent these older signers picked up on what the younger people around them are doing? Theyre part of a larger community, yet they havent adopted the regularities that the 20- and 30-year-olds are using.

Working with Martin Nowak, a professor of biology and mathematics and director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and Annemarie Kocab, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, Snedeker hopes to create computational models that can provide new insight into the social dynamics that drive language.

Amy Wagers

When you consider the greatest risk factor for many diseases, says Wagers, the Forst Family Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, it all comes down to one word: aging.

There is growing evidence that diseases such as cancer, cardiac disease, and cognitive decline today viewed as separate medical challenges could be treated by targeting their age-related roots, Wagers said.

The underlying goal of this project is to understand the fundamental physiological processes of the natural process of aging, and then understand how those impact health, Wagers said. [With] that understanding, can we develop therapies or other interventions that allow us to take aim at that root cause, or develop strategies that could be applied across different diseases of aging which have typically been thought of as independent.

The notion that many age-related diseases may share a common driver was inspired in part by the discovery of mutations in circulating blood cells that accumulate with age and lead to clonal hematopoiesis problems in the formation of blood. Wagers and colleagues hope to investigate a new hypothesis that those mutations, and the problems they cause, may be a common driver of age-associated dysfunction across organ systems.

What this project will allow us to do is clarify the relevance of these age-related [mutations], Wagers said. This will allow us to understand whether there is therapeutic value in targeting those clones.

Working with Lee Rubin, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology, and Richard T. Lee, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology and of medicine, Wagers plans to use CRISPR technology to introduce specific mutations associated with clonal hematopoiesis in humans into young and middle-aged mice, and monitor the rate of emergence of age-associated pathologies in three different organ systems: skeletal muscle, the brain, and the heart.

Elsie Sunderland

Seasonal change and illness often go hand in hand, but in West Africa, the combination can be deadly.

Every year, dust storms across the region are accompanied by devastating epidemics of bacterial meningitis, which has a mortality rate of 50 percent when left untreated, said Sunderland, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and an associate professor of environmental science and engineering at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Though its thought that the dust irritates the throat, making people more susceptible to disease, Sunderland plans to test an alternative hypothesis that meningitis bacteria are carried on the winds that drive those dust storms.

Microbes can be transported on aerosols like dust, Sunderland said. And these dust storms are very much a function of global climate so the intensity of these storms has been changing quite a bit over the last number of years. This is a very dynamic phenomenon that we are trying to link to the spread of meningitis in the area.

Sunderlands partner on the project is Buckee, an infectious disease epidemiologist from the Harvard Chan School, who said that while there has long been evidence of correlation between the dust storms and the outbreaks, the mechanism behind the link has been unclear.

Along with Buckee, Sunderland has recruited help from Tovi Lehmann of the National Institutes of Health, who samples insect populations on wind currents in Mali using helium balloons, and Stephen Bentley, a bacterial genomics expert at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

The group plans to use helium balloons and microbial collection devices to sample aerosols transported by winds in Mali, sequence the bacterial genomes that are collected, and assess the risk of atmospheric spread of meningitis and other windborne pathogens.

The idea is to provide some metrics to use for modeling to better understand these outbreaks, and to potentially use for forecasting, Sunderland said. Thats a major benefit for the practice of public health and being able to identify where vulnerable populations are.

Robin Wordsworth

With every discovery of a new exoplanet, interest in the idea that one may hold extraterrestrial life gains momentum. But how will that life be detected if the technology doesnt exist to send probes into deep space?

One possible method, says Wordsworth, an assistant professor of environmental science and engineering at SEAS, may be in detecting oxygen in the atmosphere of other planets.

Whats really fascinating and exciting about this to me is that for the first time on a large scale this question of extraterrestrial life is no longer something which is purely in literature or science fiction, Wordsworth said. Its something we can start to address scientifically.

Though there is wide evidence that oxygen in Earths atmosphere is due to the presence of life, there is debate about whether the gas is a reliable biosignature, because recent research has shown that some planets can produce oxygen-rich atmospheres abiotically.

In an effort to resolve that debate, Wordsworth and collaborators David Charbonneau, a professor of astronomy, and Dimitar Sasselov, Phillips Professor of Astronomy and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, plan to construct advanced planetary evolution models that incorporate atmospheric, surface, and interior processes to simulate the early years of a planets development the period that most affects a planets oxygen accumulation.

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Inquiring minds rewarded - Harvard Gazette