Monthly Archives: May 2022

Among our crosswords and other puzzles, well be featuring logic challenges from Puzzle Communication Nikoli, a cult-favorite puzzle publication from Japan. A PDF of the puzzle, as well as the solution, can be downloaded below.

Gesaku got his ideas from the things that he saw around him every day: the design of floor tiles on a subway platform or the ripples in a pond. Gesakuthe only name by which he is knownwas a dedicated reader of Japans Puzzle Communication Nikoli, the most influential puzzle publication in history. Nikoli is famed not just for making Sudoku a household name, but also for being created almost entirely by fans like Gesaku.

Many of those readers submit hand-crafted examples of existing puzzles. Gesaku was one of the rare readers who created his own, and he was one of Nikolis most prolific. More than 30 of his original puzzles have been chosen for publication; only two or three creators have managed this feat in Nikolis more than four decades of publication.

Shapes and mathematical regularity were Gesakus muses, according to Nikoli president Yoshinao Anpuku. Anpuku had spoken with Gesaku in the past, but the magazine has lost touch with him, and its unknown if hes still making puzzles.

Gesakus Tentai Show debuted in 2001 as a logic puzzle based on filling a grid with symmetrical shapesrecalling origami, celestial bodies such as galaxies and stars, and traditional Japanese clan symbols. The puzzle was modestly received at first, but six months later Gesaku came up with an idea that made Tentai Show one of Nikolis most beloved reader creationsusing solving logic to create a picture, making each one a kind of puzzle-based constellation.

This connection with the celestial is reinforced in the puzzles pun-based name. The Japanese word ten-taisyo means symmetry about a point, while the word tentai means heavenly body, such as a star, writes author Alex Bellos in his book about Japanese logic puzzles, Puzzle Ninja. Tentai Show is thus an anglicized pronunciation of point symmetry with a double meaning of astronomical show.

A Tentai Show consists of a grid with scattered dots. The goal is to divide the entire grid into regions, each containing a single dot. Each region must have rotational symmetry, meaning that it must form the same shape when rotated 180 degrees around the dot at the center of the region. (For example, the letter S and rectangles have this symmetry; E does not.)

Since no region can contain two dots, one way to start is to draw a line between any squares that contain a dot or a fraction of one. These segments start to form the outlines of the regions. To fill in the rest of the outlines, you will need to mentally rotate the segment 180 degrees around each dot. For example, a top edge must be matched by a bottom edge, a left by a right. Remember that the sides of the grid are part of the outlines of the regions, too. As you start to fill in the grid, you will see that the positions of the dots force a unique arrangement of regions.

To complete the puzzle and see the final image, shade in all the regions that contain a black dot at the center.

In the downloadable PDF below, youll find the instructions above, an example, three puzzles of increasing difficulty, and an Atlas Obscura surprise.

Stumped? Download the solutions!

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Puzzle Monday: Logic, Symmetry, and Astronomy - Atlas Obscura

image:Recipients of the 2022 Shaw Prize in Astronomy Lennart Lindegren and Michael Perryman. view more

Credit: Shaw Prize

Hipparcos, launched in 1989, measured the positions and motions of over 100 000 stars with an accuracy two orders of magnitude better than ground-based observatories. Gaia, launched in 2013 and still operating, has measured the positions and motions of billions of stars, quasars and Solar System objects with even higher accuracy. The results from these missions offer an exquisitely detailed portrait of the distribution and properties of the stars in our Galaxy, as well as unique insights into its formation and history, and they impact almost every branch of astronomy and astrophysics. This award is also intended to honour the much larger community of astronomers and engineers who made Hipparcos and Gaia possible.

The measurement of the positions, distances and motions of planets and stars has been central to astronomy since prehistoric times. The early naked-eye star catalogues of Ptolemy (ca. 100170 CE), Ulugh Beg (13941449) and Tycho Brahe (15461601) were supplanted in the last two centuries by telescopic catalogues of ever-increasing size and accuracy. However, by the late twentieth century, astrometry from ground-based optical telescopes encountered insurmountable barriers to further improvements, arising from atmospheric distortions, thermal and gravitational forces on the telescopes, and the difficulties of stitching together data from different telescopes.

The era of precision space astrometry began with the European Space Agencys Hipparcos mission (19891993). Hipparcos catalogued over 100 000 bright stars. It measured annual changes in the apparent position of these stars on the sky as small as the width of a human thumb in Beijing as viewed from Hong Kong. By measuring small variations in stellar positions as the Earth travelled around its orbit (parallax), Hipparcos determined distances to over 20 000 stars with uncertainties of less than 10%.

ESAs Gaia mission, launched in December 2013, is based on the same design principles as Hipparcos, but has vastly greater capabilities. Gaia has measured the positions of 10 000 times as many stars as Hipparcos with an accuracy 100 times greater. Gaia has catalogued almost one per cent of all the stars in the Milky Way, and so far has measured parallax-based distances to over 50 million stars with uncertainties of less than 10%. Such parallaxes are the foundation of all distances in astronomy and thus are the firmest foundation we have for measuring the scale of the Universe.

The study of the preliminary catalogues released by the Gaia project, all of which are in the public domain, has already transformed many areas of astronomical understanding. Even richer, larger and more accurate catalogues will be produced before the mission is completed in 2025 or later. Gaia is providing a survey of our Galaxy that will not be surpassed in quantity or quality for decades to come.

Gaia can measure changes in the positions of stars on the sky as small as the width of a human hair in Beijing as viewed from Hong Kong, and motions on the sky smaller than the apparent rate of growth of a hair belonging to an astronaut on the Moon, as seen from Earth. This remarkable performance is achieved by a unique architecture consisting of two telescopes pointing in very different directions, whose images are combined on a single detector. The telescope spins once every six hours, and sends back to Earth precise measurements of the times at which the stars cross a fixed point on the detector.

Why is accurate astrometry so important? The answer is that it provides fundamental data positions, velocities, and distances that underpin almost every aspect of modern astronomy and astrophysics. Accurate distances to stars allow us to measure their intrinsic luminosities, and this in turn is a sensitive measure of their internal physical processes, such as crystallisation in the interior of degenerate stars. Small-scale inhomogeneities in the spatial distribution of stars provide a glimpse of disrupted clusters of stars, perhaps similar to the one in which the Sun was born. Measurements of the velocities of stars allow us to infer their Galactic orbits, which in turn provide clues to the formation history of the Milky Way and the distribution of the mysterious dark matter within it.

Gaia is detecting debris from small satellite galaxies that were disrupted long ago by the Milky Way, as well as irregularities in the distribution of stars in the Galactic disc that may reflect recent disturbances from surviving satellite galaxies or unseen clumps of dark matter. Gaia measurements have for the first time allowed us to determine the orbits of distant star clusters and dwarf galaxies. Gaia will provide a rich harvest of ancillary astronomical results, including an all-sky multi-colour photometric survey of a billion stars; radial velocities of many millions of stars; light curves for hundreds of thousands of variable stars; the discovery and measurement of thousands of extrasolar planets; a survey of asteroids and other small Solar System bodies in unprecedented detail; a uniform catalogue of hundreds of thousands of distant quasars; and stringent new tests of Einsteins theory of gravity.

Hipparcos and Gaia succeeded because of the collective efforts of many people lasting over half a century. The Shaw Prize recognises two of these individuals who have made sustained key scientific contributions to the two missions. Lennart Lindegren originated many of the concepts of the Hipparcos mission design and was leader of one of the two independent teams that carried out the data analysis for Hipparcos. He was a member of the Hipparcos science team for two decades and the Gaia science team for two decades after that. Michael Perryman was Project Scientist for Hipparcos from 1981 to 1997, Chair of the Hipparcos Science Team for the same period, and lead author on the 1997 paper describing the Hipparcos catalogue. Perryman was also Project Scientist for the Gaia mission from 1995 to 2008, Chair of the Gaia Science Advisory Group from 1995 to 2000, and Chair of the Gaia Science Team from 2001 to 2008. Lindegren and Perryman proposed the concept for Gaia in the 1990s and were instrumental in its scientific and technical design.

More information

The IAU is the international astronomical organisation that brings together more than 12 000 active professional astronomers from more than 100 countries worldwide. Its mission is to promote and safeguard astronomy in all its aspects, including research, communication, education and development, through international cooperation. The IAU also serves as the internationally recognised authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and the surface features on them. Founded in 1919, the IAU is the world's largest professional body for astronomers.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

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Lennart Lindegren and Michael Perryman receive the 2022 Shaw Prize in Astronomy - EurekAlert

Nassau Community College's former observatory is looking for a new home, and a group of amateur astronomers hopes it could become New York City's first for-the-public observatory.

The Garden City school closed the 12-foot-high, 6-foot-wide observatory at the end of 2019 as it prepared for renovations. The structure, which was used by astronomy students for more than 40 years, is being replaced by a green roof and six open-air telescopes.

Local astronomers and professors are scrambling to move the half-ton galvanized steel observatory off the campus by May 24th and find it a new home.

I couldn't let it go to the scrap, and I even wanted it if I didn't have a bunch of trees in my yard, Id plop it in the middle of my yard, said Dr. Thomas Bruckner, chair of Physical Sciences at the college. But a lot of people wanted it, it was just a matter of picking it up. It's big and heavy. It doesn't come apart.

The Amateur Astronomers Association of New York is leading the mission, and after a nearly yearlong journey, it may have settled on a permanent home in the Bronx. The old observatory could see past the Andromeda Galaxy, more than 2.5 million light years from Earth, on a clear, dark night so a public space offers a unique opportunity for young aspiring astronomers to explore the cosmos.

The final frontier is just within reach if city park officials can agree to the plan in time.

Over nearly 200 years, several stargazers have tried and failed to set up the city's first public observatory, according to the International Planetarium Society. The closest alternatives are at Columbia University and various City University of New York campuses, including one shuttered on top of Ingersoll Hall at Brooklyn College. All of which are prioritized for their students.

The latest quest has likewise felt long, since the Amateur Astronomers Association took on the challenge of moving the Nassau Community College observatory in May 2021. But the association doesnt want to move the structure to a temporary home only to have to pay for a second move.

Bart Fried, the organizations executive vice president and a telescope historian, said each move would cost more than $3,000, depending on the distance, because a boom truck is required.

The first location that came to mind, in July 2021 when amateur astronomers began planning, was Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn. Its dark, and the organization has been running the parks stargazing programs for more than 40 years. But they were turned down after more than three months because of historical preservation issues, according to Fried, and the search continued.

The next site was about seven miles up the Belt Parkway. Shirley Chisholm State Park is built on a Brooklyn landfill and is a treeless stretch of prairie grassland perfect for stargazing with no obstructions.

There was one hitch. The park closes at 7 p.m., and that doesnt work for summer when it isnt fully dark until after that time.

After Shirley Chisholm [State Park] turned us down, we were feeling pretty defeated at this point, said Kat Troche, a member of the NASA Solar System Ambassador program involved in relocating the public observatory. Wow, we can't even give this thing away.

The Amateur Astronomers Association was willing to provide the programming and staffing and pay for installation, upkeep and retrofitting including theft and defacement. According to Fried, the giant structure doesnt require a foundation, and therefore no concrete work is needed in order to relocate/situate the observatory. Aside from putting metal rods into the ground to hold the observatory down, no digging will be required either. To level the structure, it needs to sit on about 6 inches? of wood decking, which will be hidden by the domes skirt. And access to utility lines isnt necessary because it will be powered by battery packs charged by solar panels.

This is super important [to have a public observatory in New York City]. One of our events could inspire future astronauts, future cosmologists, and astrophysics, Troche said. The stars it's something to aspire to. We have this natural urge to wander and the cosmos allows us to do that.

The observatory still had no solid option for a home until one fall evening in 2021. While hosting a sidewalk astronomy event near The Bronx High School of Science, it dawned on the members of the Amateur Astronomers Association that they were standing in the perfect location.

We dont do enough in the Bronx. Why dont we put the dome up there where the public can use it; and Bronx Science can use it and we can use it? Fried remembered thinking at the time. It will be New York Citys very first truly public observatory even though there have been attempts over 150 or 200 years, all of which failed for various reasons, including several attempts in Central Park.

The location is across Goulden Avenue from The Bronx High School of Science on the grassy banks along the Jerome Park Reservoir. The school also has a planetarium, and a very active astronomy club headed by the schools physical science teachers Neil Farley and Colin Morrell. School administrators have approved the plan, but it still needs sign off from city officials.

Currently, city park officials are reviewing plans for a resting place in Jerome Park, according to email correspondence shared with Gothamist.

We are in close contact with the Amateur Astronomers Association on the relocation of the observatory, and are looking into the potential of re-homing it in one of our parks, wrote Dan Kastanis, a press officer at New York City Parks Department. No plan has been finalized at this time.

While the goal is to move the observatory to its new home before Memorial Day, the parks department called their process not straight-forward with many logistical, legal and permitting issues that must be worked out first. That includes figuring out accessibility for people with disabilities, graffiti prevention and the installation process.

In the meantime, theres still a possibility that parks approval wont come in time for the observatorys eviction from Nassau Community College on May 24th. If that happens, the Amateur Astronomers Association has a backup plan. It will need to find a way to temporarily move the 360-degree rolling-top dome less than a half-mile away to the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, New York where it will be cleaned and repainted.

Despite the hassle, the several astronomers involved are determined to make this observatory accessible to anyone curious enough to gaze into the cosmos.

Of all the sciences, astronomy is the least resolved. We only know what 4% of the matter in our universe, we don't know what the rest is, Bruckner said. It's the next generations of the curious that will lead us into discovering what our universe is made out of how and why we came to be.

If all goes well, the Amateur Astronomers Association plans to celebrate the opening of the New York City Public Observatory this summer in a permanent Bronx home. The festivities would include a first-light party, a tradition that marks the initial viewing through a new telescope.

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NYC's first public observatory is running out of time to find a home - Gothamist

Move over, Gustav Holst. Theres a new Planets in town. And this one is based on astronomy, not astrology.

Holsts seven-movement orchestral suite The Planets premiered in London in 1918. Now, a little more than a century later, a modern version on the theme saw first light on Sunday May 22, 2022. But while Holst turned to astrology for inspiration, composer Daniel Perttu turned to astronomy.

Pianist Jeffrey Biegels longtime dream was to bring to life an updated version of Holsts The Planets, infusing the music with current scientific understanding. Biegel was born deaf, and until the age of three, when corrective surgery allowed him to hear for the first time, his world was very closed. He relied on other means of expression and communication, and so music became his first language. As a result, his projects often have an out of the box element. Biegels vision of a revamped Planets features the pianist as a space traveler journeying through the solar system.

A Planets Odyssey isnt your typical three-movement concerto. Instead, its in a theme-and-variations form. It begins with the Big Bang, followed by the pianist introducing the main theme of the concerto, Perttu explains. This theme is then varied as the pianist visits each planet and is inspired by the unique properties of each planet. Like Holst, Perttu skips the Earth. But unlike Holst, these planets are featured in their order from the Sun. And more importantly, Perttu focuses solely on the science.

Perttu picked a few characteristics of each planet for inspiration and transformed those into sonic visions. For example, Mercury, subject of the first variation, is the innermost and smallest of the solar systems planets and experiences extremes in temperature. It also has virtually no atmosphere. So Perttu drew on those characteristics to produce a variation that conveys the imagery of a stark, extreme kind of place.

Venus is the brightest object in the night sky, apart from the Moon and the Sun. Its atmosphere is largely roiling clouds of carbon dioxide. At the planets surface, where temperatures reach a whopping 470C (870F), the pressure is some 90 times that of Earths. At some point in its early, cooler history, Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and may have harbored life, but thats all long gone by now. The prospect of potential current or past life is always thrilling, and thats the angle that sonically describes Venus in this variation.

Rounding out the rocky planets, Mars continues to capture our imagination, with its dusty red surface and the solar systems biggest volcano. Perttu nevertheless reads a sadness in Marss story. A planet that once may have had a lush environment with liquid water on its surface and perhaps life is today instead a cold and arid world.

When we get to the gas giants, Perttu introduces a sense of airiness to the music. First comes majestic Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system, rich in hydrogen and helium. Its famous for its Great Red Spot, which is, in fact, one humongous storm that has raged for more than 300 years. The Great Red Spot and other storms on Jupiter are also sites of lightning! In fact, Perttu describes this passage as swirly, blustery, and sometimes tempestuous.

Ask most any astronomer what drew them to the subject, and the answer more often than not is their first view of Saturn through a telescope. The sight of the ethereal planet with its system of rings is inspiring at every level. But to add to the planets attraction, we now know that its atmosphere contains diamonds. And not only that, but that the diamonds might fall as rain! Hence, Saturns variation is slower but shimmery in its sensibility.

William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781. The ice giants atmosphere is largely hydrogen and helium, with traces of methane that give the planet its eerie, greenish hue (by absorbing the red wavelengths of light). Uranus is a planet with a quirk: A cataclysmic interaction with another body in the early solar system tipped it over on its side with respect to its orbital plane, so instead of orbiting the Sun like the other planets, it rolls along in its orbit. Because of this, Perttu has inverted the main theme in the variation, as well as infusing it with a dark, dismal sentiment.

Perttu composed the eighth variation to reflect a sense of windiness since the last of our planets, Neptune, is the windiest of them all. The blue ice giant, the most distant of all planets (more than 30 times the Earth-Sun distance), is dark and cold, and supersonic winds rage through its atmosphere at speeds greater than 2,000 km/h (1,200 mph). For comparison, the fastest winds recorded on Earth clock in at around 400 km/h.

And in a neat final touch, we end our odyssey all the way out in the Kuiper Belt. Of course, when Holst composed The Planets, Pluto and other distant solar system objects hadnt yet been discovered. But in a fitting coda to A Planets Odyssey, Perttu brings us to the very outer edges of our solar system.

On Sunday May 22, 2022, in the evening, the Canton Symphony Orchestra (lead commissioning orchestra in a consortium of multiple orchestras) ushered A Planets Odyssey into the world, under the direction of the Orchestras Music Director, Gerhardt Zimmermann. Biegel was at the piano.

Today is tomorrow's history, Biegel said, after the concert. There is a unique energy in the room when all the stars align to witness the birth of a new creation Dan's A Planets Odyssey created a synergy of musical, spiritual, and scientific energies igniting the hearts and minds of the audience and the performers. He concludes, It is a feeling which joins us in an historic moment like no other.

Perttu was also philosophical following the concert. Writing this piece was not only about creating a musical representation of our scientific knowledge of the planets in 2020, but it was also about how the science can inspire imagination, he mused. Who would have thought of diamond rain?! There are mysteries in this universe that likely go beyond our most fantastical speculation and this piece is meant to capture that spirit as well.

After the thrill of Sunday evening, Biegel notes that the journey doesnt finish there. He envisions that A Planets Odyssey will serve the purposes of music, science and education for students learning about our solar system.

If youre in the Flagstaff, Arizona, area in September 2022, make sure you catch the next performance of A Planets Odyssey by the Flagstaff Symphony Orchestra conducted by Music Director Charles Latshaw, with Jeffrey Biegel as piano soloist.

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Piano Concerto on the Planets Premieres - Sky & Telescope - Sky & Telescope

By Minerva Baumann, Media Relations OfficerNMSU News Team

Astronomers cant go back in time to observe how the solar system was formed, but they can observe planets that are forming now and use computer simulations to help them better understand the process.

A New Mexico State University astronomy professor is part of a team of scientists that wrote a paper published this month in the journal Nature that has identified a protoplanet in another star system that may be forming differently than expected. It is the first system in which the evidence points to this alternative theory of planet formation.

The paper images of embedded Jovian planet formation at a wide separation around AB Aurigae was published in the May 9 edition of the journal Nature and co-authored by NMSU astronomy associate professor Wladimir Lyra.

The ultimate arbiter of science is nature. We need to observe what nature does. Then to advance our knowledge, we build models to explain our observations, said Lyra, who builds computer models based on astronomical data.

The recent paper is a result of Lyras collaboration among a group of scientists including lead author Thayne Currie, an astrophysicist at NASA-Ames Research Center and the Subaru Telescope. Currie, along with other researchers, shared observational data of the protoplanet forming around AB Aurigae, a very young star in the Auriga constellation about 531 light years from the Sun.

Its not even a baby planet. Its an embryo planet, Lyra said. Its a planet that is still embedded in the disc. These planets form from gas and dust around young stars. Thats how the Earth and other planets around the Sun were formed.

Using the Subaru Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers found the data on this protoplanet was intriguing and not easily explainable. Lyra created a computer simulation to match the observations and better understand the process of how this massive gas giant planet is forming.

What they found is unexpected.

On this particular observation, what was observed was a planet 10 times more massive than Jupiter at a distance from the star that is twice the distance that Pluto is from the sun, Lyra said. This planet is still embedded in the disc. It is also still very hot. You can see the object is still glowing from its formation.

For decades, scientists have relied on two theories of how planets and stars form. One is core accretion, also known as bottom up, when small bodies about the size of an asteroid, collide and coalesce in a disk cloud, eventually adding gasses and growing massive planets the size of Jupiter or Saturn.

The second theory of planet formation is gravitational instability, also known as top down. This theory begins with a massive disc of dust and gas so large that it ends up fragmenting. In a disc around a star, these fragments collapse from the top down and are about as massive as Jupiter. This is the process by which massive stars form in a galaxy.

While the theory of gravitational instability forming planets has been around for decades, there has been no clear-cut case that demonstrates a planet could be formed in that way. The Nature article outlines evidence that the protoplanet observed around AB Aurigae is such a planet, countering long established theories.

I think that the main message from a theoretical perspective from this paper is that this is a system for which gravitational instability is a plausible mechanism for formation of this protoplanet, Lyra said. There are several independent lines of evidence that point toward gravitational instability.

Lyra emphasized while the evidence points to the formation of this protoplanet by gravitational instability, so far it doesnt disprove the possibility of it forming through the core accretion method.

The team will continue looking at that system in longer wavelengths, probing deeper into the disc. Lyra called it a very interesting avenue to explore in the future to see if there are conditions that this planet can still form by core accretion.

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NMSU professor has alternate theory on planet formation - Las Cruces Bulletin

I believe that it is in our DNA that there is the need to explore, to find something and make sense to it.

The connection between space and our origins is unique and quite identical, so I believe that through my images of the cosmos, Im reconnecting to that realm that I belong.

As much as I love photographing space as an explorer, the images that I capture are much more prefunding as Im witnessing the grandeur with never ending bliss of heaven.

Astrophotography makes me feel like actually taking part in that whole thing of whats going on.

The fact that we cant explain the wonders of the cosmos and the Universe, drives me to go out more over and over again.

The Milky-way is our home in the cosmos, the galaxy that we live in holds about 100 billion stars. During the past few decades we have discovered that at least from a physical perspective, humans are but a speck of dust in the grand scheme of the universe.We live on a small planet which revolves around a very ordinary star.

The Kepler space observatory has shown us that our Milky Way galaxy is teeming with about a billion Earth-size planets orbiting their parent stars in the Habitable Zone (that not-so-cold-not-so-hot region that allows for liquid water to exist on the planets surface) so its inevitable that earth like planets exist in our home galaxy, one can imagine now what cannot exist in the grandeur cosmos.

A deep image of a tiny piece of sky, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. Almost every point of light in this image represents a galaxy with about a hundred billion stars like the Sun.

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Why am I addicted to astronomy? - Newsbook