Ballground STEM Academy Solar Astronomy time lapse March 16th 2015
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By: Stephen W. Ramsden

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Ballground STEM Academy Solar Astronomy time lapse March 16th 2015 - Video

Astronomy Cast Ep. 371: Eddington Eclipse Experiment
Join +Fraser Cain and +Pamela Gay for a live episode of Astronomy Cast. We #39;ll record our 30-minute show, and then stick around to answer your questions about space and astronomy. Astronomy...

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Astronomy Cast Ep. 371: Eddington Eclipse Experiment - Video

When Patrick Huth learned he would be teaching an honors astronomy course at Community College of Allegheny Countys Boyce campus this semester, he figured he should offer his students something special.

So he went out and borrowed parts of the moon.

To be precise, what Mr. Huth has are a half-dozen tiny but priceless samples of moon rocks and lunar dust encased in a clear Lucite disk, all of which must be returned to the federal government after two weeks.

Between 1969 and 1972, astronauts on six Apollo missions gathered and brought back to Earth 842 pounds of lunar rocks, core samples, pebbles, sand and dust, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which houses many of the samples at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Some of those national treasures are available for two-week loaners to educators like Mr. Huth, who underwent training in the science behind those rocks and in the strict rules to safeguard them while in transit.

In the parlance of NASA, Mr. Huth, a physics professor and former NASA contractor, is lunar certified.

He plans to bring the moon rocks and a separate disk with meteorite samples into not only his astronomy class but also into his physics classes and those of other Boyce professors who have expressed interest. The rocks also will be displayed in the Boyce Student Union from 12:30 to 3 p.m. today and from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tuesday.

I wanted to get them into as many classrooms on campus as possible, Mr. Huth said. Its generated a lot of excitement and thats a good thing.

Along with what they teach about the moons composition and history, these lunar loaners symbolize one of Americas crowning scientific achievements, Mr. Huth said. Increasingly, they also are a historical marker for students who grew up decades removed from the Apollo era.

I know a couple people who have told me they want to take selfies with them, Mr. Huth said. Thats not something you would have heard back then.

See the article here:

NASA loans moon rocks for CCAC astronomy class

The site at the South Pole where all the science happens.

The IceCube detector, located at the South Pole, monitors a cubic kilometer of ice for the flashes of light produced as energetic particles traverse the ice. Each second, about 3,000 muons, produced by cosmic rays slamming into the atmosphere, interact with matter in the detector. In contrast, neutrinos are only detected once every six minutes.

Francis Halzen, the principle investigator for IceCube, described the search for these particles in the detector at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "It's like doing astronomy, but the sky is cloudy," he said. "It's cloudy all the time." Even the majority of the neutrinos that arrive at the detector aren't especially interesting; they're also produced as part of cosmic ray particle showers. Instead, the computers behind the detectors have to sort through 100 billion muons each year, along with 100,000 atmospheric neutrinos, just to find about 10 interesting events.

But the interesting events are incredibly energetic. "When it arrives, it hits your detector like a hammer," Halzen told the audience. "You don't have to look for it; it just announces itself." (The same goes for some of the energetic muons, two of which have deposited over 560 Tera electron Volts in the detectorcompare that to the LHC's upcoming 14TeV collisions.)

In part due to the small numbers it detects, IceCube has mostly told us that incredibly energetic neutrinos exist. And we can work back from that knowledge to appreciate that there are incredibly energetic processes that must produce these neutrinos"hadronic accelerators create a lot of the energy in our Universe" is how Halzen put it. But to start figuring out where in the sky these neutrinos originate, and thus what might be creating them, we need to get better at capturing more of them.

But Halzen has a plan. The ice beneath the South Pole turned out to be much better at transmitting the light from neutrino interactions than we'd expected. They now think they can take the same number of detectors (there are 5,160 of them) and spread them over 10 cubic kilometers of ice, significantly increasing the ability to capture these rare events, and possibly start zeroing in on the processes that generate them.

If IceCube has a hard time pinning down high energy neutrinos (at least until there's a nearby supernova; see sidebar), pity cosmologists. Just like the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons that tell us about the Big Bang, there's a cosmic neutrino background created by the event itself that could tell us even more. And it consists of copious numbers of neutrinos; according to Fermilab's Branford Benson, at the time the CMB was emitted, 10 percent of the Universe's energy density was neutrinos. Even today, despite their phenomenally light mass, "at the low end of the known [mass] range, neutrinos weigh as much as all the stars in the Universe," said Benson.

But, at such low energies (they're on the scale of a Mega-electronVolt), we have no way of possibly detecting the cosmic neutrino background. Until that changes, the CMB can tell us some things about neutrinos themselvesthings that are difficult to determine because the particles are so annoying to work with. Benson works on the South Pole Telescope, located near IceCube, which examines a patch of the CMB in the southern skies, achieving a 13-fold boost over the space-based WMAP probe.

With these observatories, you can spot the acoustic oscillations of matter, caused by the counteracting pull of gravity and push of radiation pressure. And these tell us about the contents of the Universe itself; matching their properties is one of the great successes of the lambda-cold dark matter model. Referring to the model, Benson said "the CMB is the best piece of evidence that we live in this Universe." And this Universe contains a lot of neutrinos.

In fact, differences in neutrino masses of as little as 0.1 electronVolts is enough to change the amount of structure in the Universe (galaxy clusters and the like) by about five percent. Of course, it's possible that this value is more than half the combined mass of all three neutrino types, so it's not as informative as it might be. Still, the CMB places some of the tightest limits on the masses of neutrinos that we've identified.

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Doing astronomy with neutrinos

Joseph Bradley, vice president IoE practise, Cisco Consulting Services, and Ros Harvey, chief strategy advisor, Sirca and founder of Sense-T at the University of Tasmania.

Cisco's investment in the Internet of Things (IoT) will help Australia's key industries push into the 21st century, especially in areas of agriculture, resources, and astronomy.

The company announced its Internet of Everything (IoE; its version of IoT) centre will be located in Sydney at Sirca, an organisation owned by 40 universities across Australia and New Zealand, and in Perth at the Curtin University campus, contributing $15 million over five years.

See ARN's full story here.

CiscoLive! 2015 saw the assembling of key experts that have worked on the project, including Joseph Bradley, vice president IoE practise, Cisco Consulting Services; Kevin Bloch, CTO Cisco A/NZ; Dr Michael Briars, CEO, Sirca; Professor Steven Tingay, research fellow, director of the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy; and Ros Harvey, chief strategy advisor, Sirca; and founder of Sense-T at the University of Tasmania.

Bradley, who is responsible for leading Cisco's IoE vision worldwide, says that there remains some confusion over the nature of the Internet of Everything, not just from end user consumers, but in terms of those that are expected to deploy it. Questions of the value proposition abound.

"The IoE value is not in the things in and of themselves, but the connection between them," he said.

Even after the assets are connected, it becomes more about how data should be structured to make it usable. Then the application of analytics to that data is how the major value will be extracted, and how it is applied.

"Big Data is nothing without big judgement," he said.

The opportunity from 'dark assets', that is, something that's not connected to the internet today, is vast, he said.

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Cisco Live!: How Internet of Things will be the next big disruptor