Professors lead Purdue in astronomy project in hopes to define dark energy

Two Purdue professors have been developing what could be a defining moment for dark matter and space studies.

Since 2007, Purdue has been a part of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) project as an institutional member. The project plans to build the biggest astronomical camera ever made, unlocking the sight of many galaxies in deep space. Purdues team, made up of physics professor Wei Cui and associate professor John Peterson, has been contributing to the project.

The LSST project has been under the spotlight for several decades, but with the recent approval of a $473 million budget by the National Science Foundation, the project has taken off. The budget covers the construction of the LSST, which will be constructed on a mountain in Chile. Along with the telescope, other surrounding facilities will be built, such as a data center that will transfer data to the National Center for Supercomputing Application at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Purdue contributes a vital key to the project by providing the Photon Simulator, a software that creates images of what the completed LSST might see. The simulator, also known as PhoSim, takes atmospheric, camera and telescopic values into account, making the images as realistic as possible.

We really have to design the software very well to be able to analyze all those images and make those measurements, said Peterson. So thats what these practice (PhoSim) images are used for.

According to Peterson, the telescope will take 10 years before it completes its full 120 petabyte image about 30 terabytes per night.

Its the product of the field of view and the size of the mirror that gives the big survey, Peterson said.

Since Purdue joined LSST seven years ago, Peterson, Cui and their students have had many opportunities to give input for the project with the help of the University.

Purdue has been very supportive at different levels, said Cui. The student involvement has been very successful and helpful. Without these two things, itll be difficult.

Both Peterson and Cui are always looking for undergraduate, graduate and post-doctorate students to participate in the worldwide project.

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Professors lead Purdue in astronomy project in hopes to define dark energy

Astronomy – Ch. 2: Understanding the Night Sky (7 of 20) Understanding Earth’s Longitude & Latitude – Video


Astronomy - Ch. 2: Understanding the Night Sky (7 of 20) Understanding Earth #39;s Longitude Latitude
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will explain the Earth #39;s longitude and latitude.

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Astronomy - Ch. 2: Understanding the Night Sky (7 of 20) Understanding Earth's Longitude & Latitude - Video

Zeitraffer Wettbewerb 2014 – This is my story of my hobby: Astronomy – Video


Zeitraffer Wettbewerb 2014 - This is my story of my hobby: Astronomy
Dieses Video wurde mit LRTimelapse http://lrtimelapse.com fr den Zeitraffer-Wettbewerb auf http://gwegner.de erstellt. Nikon 5100,Nikon 7000 Nikkor AF-S 10-24 Nikkor AF-S 18-200 LRTimelapse...

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Alien Astronomy – Alien’s View of the Solar System – Are we being Watched? – Trans-Neptunian Region – Video


Alien Astronomy - Alien #39;s View of the Solar System - Are we being Watched? - Trans-Neptunian Region
Courtesy of and Credit: NASA #39;s Goddard Space Flight Center Dust ground off icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, the cold-storage zone that includes Pluto and millions of other objects, creates a...

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Looking at the stars

Hawaii is perfect for astronomy, according to astronomy instructor Geoff Mathews, but the Mnoa campus didnt have any undergraduate degrees in astronomy and astrophysics until now.

And UH of all places with its great telescope on Big Island and Maui, good research institute for astronomy and a strong physics and astronomy department, its just obvious and its timely that we (Mnoa) should have such a program, said Pui Lam, Department of Physics and Astronomy chairman.

The Board of Regents approved the launch of these two degrees at its Aug. 21 meeting.

Comprised of 62 credit hours, the astrophysics degree program is intended for students who want to study the origin of the universe and how solar systems are created, Lam said. According to David Sanders, astronomy graduate program chairman at the Institute for Astronomy, astrophysics is more of a professional science degree for someone going on to graduate school.

In other words, an undergraduate degree in astrophysics is almost a necessity if youre going to go on to graduate work and get a Ph.D. in the field because astronomy is basically a subset of physics. Its just physics applied to stars and galaxies, Sanders said. So it requires a pretty good background in physics, math, and then depending on what branch of astrophysics, you could have some biology and chemistry as well, but in terms of undergraduate degrees, the easiest thing to say is it requires more credit hours and the hard sciences.

The astronomy program, which requires 48 credits, is intended for students who are interested in how stars are formed in the historical way, rather than the physics behind it.

Both programs require courses in astronomy, physics, math and chemistry.

PROGRAMS WORTH WAITING FOR

According to Lam, the process to create these degrees started more than two years ago, but it really began in the 1960s when the then-physics department became the department of physics and astronomy.

During that time, a group of astronomers had been hired into the department and later established the research astronomy institute. Some taught introductory astronomy courses but there was no full program.

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Looking at the stars

Radio Telescopes Settle Controversy Over Distance to Pleiades

Image Caption: Optical image of the Pleiades. Credit: NOAO/AURA/NSF

Dave Finley, National Radio Astronomy Observatory

Astronomers have used a worldwide network of radio telescopes to resolve a controversy over the distance to a famous star cluster a controversy that posed a potential challenge to scientists basic understanding of how stars form and evolve. The new work shows that the measurement made by a cosmic-mapping research satellite was wrong.

The astronomers studied the Pleiades, the famous Seven Sisters star cluster in the constellation Taurus, easily seen in the winter sky. The cluster includes hundreds of young, hot stars formed about 100 million years ago. As a nearby example of such young clusters, the Pleiades have served as a key cosmic laboratory for refining scientists understanding of how similar clusters form. In addition, astronomers have used the measured physical characteristics of Pleiades stars as a tool for estimating the distance to other, more distant, clusters.

Until the 1990s, the consensus was that the Pleiades are about 430 light-years from Earth. However, the European satellite Hipparcos, launched in 1989 to precisely measure the positions and distances of thousands of stars, produced a distance measurement of only about 390 light-years.

That may not seem like a huge difference, but, in order to fit the physical characteristics of the Pleiades stars, it challenged our general understanding of how stars form and evolve, said Carl Melis, of the University of California, San Diego. To fit the Hipparcos distance measurement, some astronomers even suggested that some type of new and unknown physics had to be at work in such young stars, he added.

To solve the problem, Melis and his colleagues used a global network of radio telescopes to make the most accurate possible distance measurement. The network included the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a system of 10 radio telescopes ranging from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands; the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia; the 1,000-foot-diameter William E. Gordon Telescope of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico; and the Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany.

Using these telescopes working together, we had the equivalent of a telescope the size of the Earth, said Amy Miouduszewski, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). That gave us the ability to make extremely accurate position measurements the equivalent of measuring the thickness of a quarter in Los Angeles as seen from New York, she added.

The astronomers used this system to observe several Pleiades stars over about a year and a half to precisely measure the apparent shift in each stars position caused by the Earths rotation around the Sun. Seen at opposite ends of the Earths orbit, a star appears to move slightly against the backdrop of more-distant cosmic objects. Called parallax, the technique is the most accurate distance-measuring method astronomers have, and relies on simple trigonometry.

The result of their work is a distance to the Pleiades of 443 light-years, accurate, the astronomers said, to within one percent. This is the most accurate and precise measurement yet made of the Pleiades distance.

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Radio Telescopes Settle Controversy Over Distance to Pleiades

Researchers awarded $1.5 million to develop software to process solar astronomy data on larger scale

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

2-Sep-2014

Contact: LaTina Emerson lemerson1@gsu.edu 404-413-1353 Georgia State University

ATLANTAResearchers in Georgia State University's new Astroinformatics program have been awarded $1.5 million from the National Science Foundation to develop software tools that can process large sets of solar astronomy data and allow scientists to perform analyses on scales and detail levels that have not been possible.

Dr. Rafal Angryk of the Department of Computer Science is the principal investigator and and Dr. Petrus Martens of the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Dr. Katharine Reeves of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are the co-principal investigators. They are working to improve tools that were designed by an international consortium, the Solar Dynamics Observatory Feature Finding Team, funded by NASA and led by Petrus Martens, that sort through large volumes of solar imaging data and identify features and phenomena of interest to solar researchers.

The improvements would allow the solar community to pursue a wide range of research projects that previously would have taken an excessive time to complete. Solar physics and space weather communities could use the software tools to perform large-scale data-driven discovery and analyses of the relationships between different types of solar activity on scales and detail levels that are unprecedented.

"There is no doubt that we are in the era of Big Data, or as I like to refer to it as 'The Data Deluge,'" said Dr. Rajshekhar Sunderraman, chair of the Department of Computer Science at Georgia State. "Traditional approaches to dealing with data fail miserably with the volume of data being generated, and we need innovative algorithms and software tools to analyze the data and infer new knowledge in a timely manner. Even though this project specifically targets solar data, the methods and tools devised would be applicable to a wide range of other domains. We are excited to be part of the project and hope for important breakthroughs to be made."

In 2010, the launch of NASA's space-based Solar Dynamics Observatory brought massive data to solar physics. The ground-based Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, under construction in Maui, will provide even larger volumes of solar imaging and magnetic field data.

This project will provide easy access to a scalable and high-end tracking and analytics toolkit for solar events and build and publicize large-scale solar data products that are easy to download and understand. It will strengthen the basic science needed to meet the goals of the national space weather programs, which are designed to develop the diagnostic tools to forecast conditions in the near space environment that can affect communication satellites, navigation systems, power grids, and space and air travels.

The software could also benefit other scientific areas that register and analyze data in the forms of spatial objects that evolve over time, such as terrestrial weather, climate-related research and analyses of migration dynamics.

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Researchers awarded $1.5 million to develop software to process solar astronomy data on larger scale

Astronomy – Ch. 2: Understanding the Night Sky (6 of 20) Motion of Stars, Earth, Sun, Moon – Video


Astronomy - Ch. 2: Understanding the Night Sky (6 of 20) Motion of Stars, Earth, Sun, Moon
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will discuss the motions that hinder our abilities to find objects in the...

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Astronomy - Ch. 2: Understanding the Night Sky (6 of 20) Motion of Stars, Earth, Sun, Moon - Video

Highlights of the Night Sky – September 2014 | Astronomy Space Science Video – Video


Highlights of the Night Sky - September 2014 | Astronomy Space Science Video
More space news and info at: http://www.coconutsciencelab.com - what to look for in the night sky during September 2014. Please rate and comment, thanks! Credits: STScI.

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Highlights of the Night Sky - September 2014 | Astronomy Space Science Video - Video