Category Archives: Astronomy

Astronomy is progressing rapidly these days, thanks in part to how advances in one area can contribute to progress in another. For instance, improved optics, instruments, and data processing methods have allowed astronomers to push the boundaries of optical and infrared to gravitational wave (GW) astronomy. Radio astronomy is also advancing considerably thanks to arrays like the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, which will join with observatories in Australia in the near future to create the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).

In particular, radio astronomers are using next-generation instruments to study phenomena like Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and neutron stars. Recently, an international team of scientists led by the University of Manchester discovered a strange radio-emitting neutron star with a powerful magnetic field (a magnetar) and an extremely slow rotational period of 76 seconds. This discovery could have significant implications for radio astronomy and hints at a possible connection between different types of neutron stars and FRBs.

The research was led by astrophysicists Manisha Caleb, Ian Heywood, and Benjamin Stappers from the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. They were joined by researchers from the MeerTRAP (More Transients and Pulsars) group, an international consortium funded by the European Research Council (ERC) that collaborates closely with the Max-Planck Institut fr Radioastronomie (MPIfR) and multiple European universities and research institutes. The paper that describes their discovery recently appeared in Nature Astronomy.

Neutron stars are the extremely dense remnants of massive stars that have undergone gravitational collapse and shed their outer layers in a supernova. These stars often have very fast spins, and their powerful magnetic fields cause them to emit tight beams of radiation that sweep across the sky (hence the term magnetar). Astronomers are currently aware of about 3,000 pulsars in the Milky Way galaxy, and the timing of their pulses is used as a sort of astronomical beacon (or cosmic lighthouse).

In all previous cases, magnetars have been observed to have rapid rotational periods. But in this case, the team observed what appeared to be an ultra-long period magnetar, a theoretical class of neutron stars with extremely strong magnetic fields. The source was initially detected thanks to a single pulse observed by the MeerTRAP instrument piggybacking on observations led by The HUNtforDynamic andExplosiveRadiotransientswithmeerKAT (ThunderKAT) team.

The two then conducted follow-up observations together that confirmed the position of the source and the timing of the pulses. As Dr. Manisha Caleb, a former postdoctoral researcher from the University of Manchester and a current astrophysical researcher at the University of Sydney, said:

Amazingly we only detect radio emission from this source for 0.5% of its rotation period. This means that it is very fortuitous that the radio beam intersected with the Earth. It is therefore likely that there are many more of these very slowly spinning sources in the Galaxy which has important implications for how neutron stars are born and age.

The majority of pulsar surveys do not search for periods this long and so we have no idea how many of these sources there might be. In this case the source was bright enough that we could detect the single pulses with the MeerTRAP instrument at MeerKAT.

The sensitivity that MeerKAT provides, combined with the sophisticated searching that was possible withMeerTRAP and an ability to make simultaneous images of the sky, made this discovery possible, added Dr. Heywood, a senior researcher with the University of Oxford and a member of the ThunderKAT team who collaborated on this study. Even then, it took an eagle eye to recognize it for something that was possibly a real source because it was so unusual looking!

The newly-discovered neutron star, designated PSR J0901-4046 (for Pulsating Radio Source), is an especially interesting object that shows characteristics of pulsars, magnetars, and even fast radio bursts. This is indicated by the radio emissions that are consistent with pulsars which are also known for having longer orbital periods. In contrast, the chaotic sub-pulse components and the polarization of the pulses are consistent with magnetars.In addition to being a new type of neutron star that was only theorized previously, this discovery occurred in a well-studied part of the galaxy.

Radio surveys dont usually search for neutron stars or pulse periods that last more than a few tens of milliseconds (i.e., millisecond pulsars). Ben Stappers, a professor of astrophysics at Manchester University and the Principal Investigator of the MeerTRAP project, says that this discovery could mean that there are plenty of opportunities for new radio surveys in the region:

The radio emission from this neutron star is unlike any we have ever seen before. We get to view it for about 300 milliseconds, which is much longer than for the majority of other radio emitting neutron stars. There seem to be at least 7 different pulse types, some of which show strongly periodic structure, which could be interpreted as seismic vibrations of the neutron star. These pulses might be giving us vital insight into the nature of the emission mechanism for these sources.

Given how challenging this discovery was and the collaborative effort it took to make it, detecting similar sources is likely to be difficult. However, this implies that there could be a larger population of undetected long-period neutron stars just waiting to be discovered. This discovery also raises the possibility of a new class of radio transients ultra-long period neutron stars that suggest a possible connection between highly-magnetized neutron stars, ultra-long period magnetars, and fast radio bursts.

These results could help resolve the enduring mystery of what causes FRBs, which astronomers have puzzled over since the first was detected in 2007 (the Lorimer Burst). This is especially true in the rare instances where the source has been repeating in nature. While the study of this energetic phenomenon has also advanced considerably, astronomers are still unsure what causes them with explanations ranging from rotating neutron stars and black holes to possible extraterrestrial transmissions!

Further Reading: The University of Manchester, Nature Astronomy

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A Pulsar has Been Found Turning so Slowly Astronomers Didn't Even Think it was Possible: Once Every 76 Seconds - Universe Today

This visualization shows trajectories of asteroids found using ADAM (in green). Earths orbit is represented by a blue arc closer to the sun. (B612 Asteroid Institute / UW DiRAC Institute / Open Space Project)

Astronomers have used a cloud-based technique pioneered at the University of Washington to identify and track asteroids in bunches of a hundred or more. Their achievement could dramatically accelerate the quest to find potentially threatening space rocks.

The technique makes use of an open-source analysis platform known as Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping, or ADAM; plus a recently developed algorithm called Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery, or THOR. The THOR algorithm was created by Joachim Moeyens, an Asteroid Institute Fellow at UW; and Mario Juric, director of UWs DiRAC Institute.

Teaming up ADAM and THOR may sound like a cross between a Bible story and a Marvel comic, but this dynamic duos superpower is strictly scientific: When ADAM runs the THOR algorithm, the software can determine the orbits of asteroids, even previously unidentified asteroids, by sifting through any large database of astronomical observations.

ADAM has been a long-term project for the Asteroid Institute, a program of the California-based B612 Foundation.

Discovering and tracking asteroids is crucial to understanding our solar system, enabling development of space, and protecting our planet from asteroid impacts, former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, the Asteroid Institutes executive director, said today in a news release. With THOR running on ADAM, any telescope with an archive can now become an asteroid search telescope.

To demonstrate the techniques power, Moeyens used THOR to analyze 30 days worth of imagery from the NOIRLab Source Catalog, a collection of nearly 68 billion observations made by the National Optical Astronomy Observatorys telescopes between 2012 and 2019.

The Asteroid Institutes ADAM platform is perfectly suited for the THOR algorithm, Moeyens explained. Built on Google Cloud, ADAMs innate scalability and computational power allows us to fully maximize THORs potential as a discovery algorithm and ultimately allows us to find those asteroids that have thus far remained undetected in archival datasets.

Out of 1,354 asteroid detections made using THOR, Moeyens selected a sampling of 113 candidates to submit to the International Astronomical Unions Minor Planet Center. The center, which maintains the authoritative list of asteroids, added 104 of the asteroids to its list. (The other nine turned out to be previously known asteroids.)

Most of the 104 asteroids are in the main belt, between Mars and Jupiter. None of them poses a threat to Earth.

Validation for the new asteroid search technique could open the way to discover tens of thousands of asteroids that are hidden within the data sets from NOIRLab and other telescope teams.

These developments couldnt have come at a better time.

When it comes to discovering an asteroid, being able to describe its orbit is a must. Nearly all of the more than 750,000 asteroids on the Minor Planet Centers list have been identified by tracking the shifts in their orbits, often starting out with shifts seen over the course of a single night.

Computers have taken a lot of the tedium out of that tracking task in recent years. Nevertheless, relying on single-night tracks, which astronomers call tracklets, can take you only so far.

Astronomers are reaching the limits of whats discoverable with current techniques and telescopes, Juric said.

Juric told GeekWire that the first stages in the evolution of astronomy focused on big glass, and bigger glass, and even bigger glass.

Then it turned into big cameras, and even bigger cameras, and even bigger instruments, he said. Now we have to add software to that component, because thats really where the next breakthrough is likely to happen.

Powered by Google Cloud, the ADAM-THOR technique can look at archival views of the night sky captured at different times, and then extrapolate from that data to pinpoint the same asteroid at different points in its orbit.

More about THOR: Check out the Asteroid Institutes FAQ about the ADAM-THOR asteroid search

Both Juric and Moeyens said identifying the first 104 asteroids was just the start. Its a small number of whats possibly in that data set, Moeyens told GeekWire. Juric estimated that the first round of analysis looked at a mere 0.2% of the total NOIRLab data set. Itll take several months to go through the whole database.

Well have a fun summer, Juric said.

Moeyens said the tracklet-less search technique neednt be limited to archival searches. With additional development, ADAM-THOR will be able to perform real-time asteroid discovery on observations as they come in from telescopes around the globe, he said.

The pace of real-time discovery is expected to go into overdrive when the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (and its Simonyi Survey Telescope, named after Seattle software billionaire Charles Simonyi) comes online in Chile in 2024.

UWs DiRAC Institute is due to play a key role in analyzing data from the Rubin Observatory. For solar system studies, that observatory is going to be a once-in-a-generation game-changer, Juric said. To give you a sense of whats coming, were expecting anywhere between one to 10 interstellar objects per year to be discovered. Numbers of trans-Neptunian objects will go up by a factor of 10, and total numbers of asteroids will go up by a factor of five.

Looking beyond asteroids, THOR could well be used to find other kinds of solar system objects, perhaps even planets.

Were looking at trans-Neptunian objects and trying to extend the depth to which [the observatory] can see, in effect, by a factor of two, Juric said. So, twice as far as you could with traditional methods for looking for things like Planet Nine or dwarf planets.

The Asteroid Institute will also have a big role to play thanks to a financial boost from the B612 Foundation.

Last week, the B612 Foundation announced that its received $1.3 million in contributions to support the Asteroid Institute and the ADAM project. The foundation also has won a commitment from Titos Handmade Vodka to match additional contributions up to the $1 million level.

We are humbled and inspired by the generosity of our funding partners, Danica Remy, president and chief executive of the B612 Foundation, said in a news release. Their support over the years and into the future, along with Titos matching challenge, is helping us scale our technical team and expand our scientific, technical and educational partnerships.

Remy said the B612 Foundation, which was created 20 years ago to raise awareness about the perils and potential payoffs associated with asteroids, has a three-year goal to raise $4 million more to advance ADAM. These funds will enable ADAM to analyze historical data and future data coming from Vera Rubin Observatory and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will enable new asteroids discoveries and orbits, she said.

This report has been updated with quotes from UW astronomers Joachim Moeyens and Mario Juric.

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Astronomers demonstrate how using the cloud can rev up the race to find asteroids - GeekWire

There are times I just want to post a pretty astronomical image, something that delights the eyes and gives a sense of wonder about the sky.

The problem with this or problem, I should say is that theres no such thing as just a pretty picture. In every case, they wind up leading to some interesting cosmic insight.

But this time its more. This particular pretty picture may hold the key to how one of the critical components of our Milky Way galaxy formed.

So first, the eye candy:

Wow! That is Liller 1, a cluster of stars. Its generically called a globular cluster these are roughly spherical collections of hundreds of thousands of stars that orbit around their center of gravity. The Milky Way has about 160 such clusters, though some galaxies have many, many more. Regular readers know I love globulars, and have written about them a lot. Theyre beautiful, and many of them are easily spotted in small telescopes, so theyre a favorite of mine for many reasons.

Right away I knew Liller 1 was weird. Its so red! And the stars around it are so blue, so something must be up. In situations like this the first thing I do is check the filters used to see if the colors might be a bit skewed, messing up how we see things. In this Hubble image(and you should click that; the full-size image of Liller 1 there is jaw-dropping) it turns out the colors are indeed skewed, but, ironically, it doesnt matter.

In this image what you see as blue is actually red light. And what you see as red is actually near-infrared light, just outside what our eyes can detect. So no, this isnt displayed natural color more or less what youd see by eye but in fact this does show that the cluster is very, very red. Why?

In this case its location. Liller 1 is about 26,000 light-years away from us and very close to the galactic center, probably only a couple of thousand light-years from it. The Milky Ways core is loaded with clouds of dust made of tiny grains of rocky and sooty material which scatter away blue light. Only red light can get through to us, so any object there will look much redder than it really is. In this case, the Milky Way stars that we see as blue in the image are actually red stars, but the Liller 1 stars are exceptionally red due to the dust.

Still, this gave me pause. Globulars orbit the galactic center, and most are seen far from it in the sky. A few are relatively close to the center as they plunge through the galaxy on their orbits, but having one this close to the exact center struck me as odd.

And it is odd! Thats because Liller 1 is almost certainly not a globular cluster. Its the remains of what was once a much larger object that the Milky Way ate.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with a flat disk of stars, gas, and dust. In the center is what we call the bulge, generally a flattened spheroid of older, redder stars, though in different galaxies it has different shapes. Ours is lozenge-shaped, like a Tic Tac. How the bulge formed isnt clear, but one hypothesis is it came together as large structures fell to the galactic center and were stripped of their stars. Some of these structures may have been enormous clumps of stars and gas in the Milky Ways disk, and others could have been dwarf galaxies onto themselves, with a few billion stars in them.

Could Liller 1 be one of those dwarf galaxies? The evidence points strongly to it! Globulars tend to be very old, with a single population of ancient stars in them, usually over 12 billion years old. Some, though, have a second or even third population of stars that are younger, maybe 10 billion years. But looking at Liller 1s stars, astronomers found it has an old population of 12-billion-year-old stars and a second thats only 1- 2 billion years old! Thats a huge discrepancy, and shows that somehow it was able to make stars far more recently than globulars do.

But how? Globulars are well known not to have any gas in them they dont have enough gravity to hold onto it as massive stars explode and blow the gas out so they cant make stars. Liller 1, though, was somehow able to hold on to its gas for eons. Its likely more massive than your typical globular, with as much as 2.5 million times the mass of the Sun. But in the past it may have had a few billion solar masses of stars in it, again strongly implying it was once more like a small galaxy than a big cluster.

And its not alone. Terzan 5 is another globular-like cluster in the Milky Way core, and also has two distinct populations of stars in it; in fact the astronomers were suspicious of Liller 1 because they had previously examined Terzan 5 and came to the conclusion it too was what they call a bulge fossil fragment.

Both of these objects are difficult to see because of the dust obscuration, but imply there may be more of them in the core, partially hidden from view. If these truly are surviving structures from the birth of our galaxy and the construction of its bulge, they are critical pieces of the puzzle of how our Milky Way came to be the way it is. If we can find more, then solving that puzzle becomes more doable.

And its like I said: In astronomy, theres no such thing as just a pretty picture. There is always a much, much bigger picture its a part of.

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The secret of the bulge: A gorgeous partially digested galaxy in the Milky Ways core - Syfy

It may be a long shot, but "something spectacular" may be coming to the skies Monday night. Experts say there is the potential for people living anywhere in the Americas to see an extremely rare meteor storm on Memorial Day after the sun goes down.

The meteors may be visible as Earth passes through the remains of a comet that split apart three decades ago and is still fragmenting, CBS Denver reports. The comet named "Schwassmann-Wachmann 3" began to break up in 1995, and its debris is expected to intersect with the Earth's orbit which could result in an intense meteor shower called Tau Herculids.

A meteor shower is classified as a meteor storm when at least 1,000 meteors per hour are produced.

"If it actually passes through this broken up trail, you could see a lot of meteors every hour," Fraser Cain, publisher of the astronomy outlet "Universe Today," told KCBS Radio.

However, Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Societysays the meteors entering the atmosphere must be larger than normal in order to be seen from the ground.

Because of that, Lunsford says the meteor shower is highly unlikely -- but he adds: "We believe that this event has a chance of being something spectacular and that we would be remiss by not publicizing it."

According toEarthSky.org, the famous Leonid meteor storm of 1966 produced meteors falling at a rate of 40 meteors per second. Witnesses said they felt like they had to clutch the ground because of the impression of Earth moving through space.

NASA says astronomers have been observing the comet for nearly a century, and the comet's trajectory and path around the sun is well understood.

"Amateur and professional astronomers around the world have been tracking its spectacular disintegration for years," NASA said.

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Comet that split apart in 1995 could produce rare Tau Herculids meteor storm on Memorial Day: "Something spectacular" - CBS News

Spiral galaxy NGC 4603 containing Cepheids being used for distance measurements. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Maund

The top-ranked scientific justification for building the Hubble Space Telescope was to determine the size and age of the Universe through observations of Cepheid variables in distant galaxies. This scientific goal was so important that it put constraints on the lower limit of the size of Hubbles primary mirror. Cepheids are a special type of variable star with very stable and predictable brightness variations. The period of these variations depends on physical properties of the stars such as their mass and true brightness. This means that astronomers, just by looking at the variability of their light, can find out about the Cepheids physical nature, which then can be used very effectively to determine their distance. For this reason, cosmologists call Cepheids standard candles.

Astronomers have used Hubble to observe Cepheids with extraordinary results. The Cepheids have then been used as stepping-stones to make distance measurements for supernovae, which have, in turn, given a measure for the scale of the Universe. Today we know the age of the Universe to a much higher precision than before Hubble: around 13.7 billion years.

We certainly live in exciting times. Hubble has made enormous progress possible within cosmology. Today we have a much more unified cosmological picture than was possible even five years ago when people were talking of The Cosmology in Crisis. We have seen a dramatic change from misery to glory!

Gustav A. Tammann, Astronomer, University of Basel

Pictured is the supernova of the type Ia star 1994D, in galaxy NGC 4526. The supernova is the bright spot in the lower left corner of the image. Credit: ESA/Hubble

One of Hubbles initial core purposes was to determine the rate of expansion of the Universe, known to astronomers as the Hubble Constant. After eight years of Cepheid observations this work was concluded by finding that the expansion increases by 70 km/second for every 3.26 million light-years you look further out into space.

Hubbles sharp vision means that it can see exploding stars, supernovae that are billions of light years away, and difficult for other telescopes to study. A supernova image from the ground usually blends in with the image of its host galaxy. Hubble can distinguish the light from the two sources and thus measure the supernova directly.

For many years cosmologists have discussed whether the expansion of the Universe would stop in some distant future or continue ever more slowly. From the results of Hubbles supernova studies, it seems clear that the expansion is nowhere near slowing down. In fact, due to some mysterious property of space itself, called dark energy, the expansion is accelerating and will continue forever. This surprising conclusion came from combined measurements of remote supernovae with most of the worlds top-class telescopes, including Hubble. Furthermore, recent supernova results indicate that cosmos did not always accelerate, but began accelerating when the Universe was less than half its current age.

Since Hubbles measurement of the expansion of the Universe, there have been other more precise measurements, such as with the Spitzer Space Telescope. However, these different measurements havent been in agreement, causing a mystery and spawning new theories. New measurements with NASAs Roman Space Telescope or from gravitational waves may help resolve the controversy.

The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe led to three astronomers, Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt, being awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Hubble gave us the distance measurements of the first four supernovae that made us realize something was wrong with our present understanding of the Universe. Even though the definite proof that the Universe is accelerating came later, we could not reconcile our Hubble observations with a Universe where the expansion is slowing down.

Bruno Leibundgut, Astronomer, European Southern Observatory (ESO)

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Astronomy & Astrophysics 101: Measuring the Age and Size of the Universe - SciTechDaily

Messier 5 is a large, bright and beautiful globular cluster, making it a show-stopping object for the late spring. Image: Ronald Brescher.

Messier 5 in Serpens Caput is a dynamic and beautiful globular cluster that can easily be spotted through a pair of binoculars and fruitfully observed through even a moderate-sized telescope. Globular clusters are extremely luminous, spherical conglomerations of up to a million stars crammed into a space spanning between just tens to perhaps 200 light years. This makes them among the most densely packed stellar systems in the Universe. Not only are globulars marvellous objects to observe, but they provide much food for thought as you gaze upon their sheer majesty, with the vast majority of them believed to be nearly as old as the Universe itself.

At this time of the year, the prime-time night sky is brimming with some of the best globulars of all, including mighty Messier 13 in Hercules, Messier 3 in Canes Venatici and a whole sackful in nearby Ophiuchus. The good news is that M5 comfortably holds its own with the fierce competition.

From pristine dark-sky sites, Messier 5 (NGC 5904, magnitude +5.7) is faintly visible with the naked eye, lying 22 arcminutes north-north-west of the star 5 Serpentis (HIP 74975, magnitude +5.4). Remember to look for M5 in Serpens Caput and not Serpens Cauda; the former lies to the south-west of Hercules, while M5s environs border Virgo.

As darkness falls on an early June evening, M5 can be seen at an altitude of around 40 degrees high to the south from mid-northern latitudes, soon destined to transit the southern meridian at around 11.50pm BST.

Messier 5 shows up as an unresolved patch of light through 10 x 50 binoculars, but a telescope as modest as 75 or 80mm (~three inches) in aperture has sufficient revolving power to pick out the clusters more outlying stars. It can also show that M5 is ever-so slightly elliptical in shape, with its concentrated core offset mainly to the east and slightly to the north. Upgrade to a 150200mm (six- to eight-inch) telescope for a truly memorable view; on a steady and transparent night, when you can push the magnification, you should be able to see (resolve) individual stars across a roughly 10 arcminute-sized sphere and more or less all the way down to M5s core.

M5 makes an epic imaging target, especially for long focal length telescopes. Its overall bluish nebulous haze, which expands to between 17 and 23 arcminutes (depending where you look in the literature), is liberally sprinkled with beautifully contrasting golden suns.

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Messier 5's big appeal in early summer's globular feast Astronomy Now - Astronomy Now Online

Students keen to pursue astronomy and physics research can enrol for a seven-week programme hosted by Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune. The last date for sending online applications for the VSP is May 31.

Students who have completed their first-year M Sc, either in physics, applied mathematics, astronomy, electronics or scientific computing, are eligible to apply for the Vacation Students Programme (VSP). Besides, third-year bachelors of technology or engineering and those in the third or fourth year of the integrated M Sc programme can also send applications. The last date for sending online applications for the VSP is May 31.

During the programme, students will be mentored by scientists. They can also take part in seminars and pursue projects.

The IUCAA will pay the participating students a stipend of Rs 10,000 along with free on-campus accommodation and travel allowance by train. Enquiries can be sent to aocp@iucaa.in.

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Pune: IUCAA to offer 7-week vacation programme in astronomy, application closes on May 31 - The Indian Express

The Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array in the Northern Cape. (Image credit: SARAO)

South Africas Hydrogen Epoch of Reionisation Array (HERA) telescope has attracted over R74 million direct financial investment since 2013.

This is according to the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), which has undertaken a local impact study of SAs hosting of HERA.

The HERA telescope is an array of 350 antennas situated next to the MeerKAT radio telescope on the site that hosts the Square Kilometre Array in the Northern Cape.

HERA is a US-led project that forms part of a large international collaboration representative of institutions from Europe, SA, the UK and US.

The goal is to observe how the first structures formed in the very early stages of the Universe, as the first stars and galaxies lit up space.

Construction of the telescope began in 2015, with the full array reaching completion in 2021.

SARAO managed the construction of the infrastructure in close collaboration with US institutions. The instrument is now undergoing commissioning and validation of its data.

The findings from the financial assessment of the impact study indicate the total direct investment made towards the HERA project is well over R70 million (R74 090 948), which was invested by the three countries from 2013 to 2021.

This represents the annual direct investment towards HERA from all contributing countries. An increase in the direct financial investment is observed from 2015, which marks the start of construction of the instrument in SA.

The maximum annual direct financial investment occurred in 2018 (R23 409 564; ie, 32% of the total direct financial investment) at the peak of the construction efforts, with the annual direct financial investment tapering off as the project neared completion over the period 2019 to 2021, says SARAO.

It notes the findings from the HERA impact study indicate SA received substantial direct foreign investment for construction of the infrastructure.

Most of the investment towards infrastructure went to the Northern Cape, with materials sourced from local suppliers during construction of the infrastructure.

At a regional level, it was found that Carnarvon benefitted most from the investment when compared to other towns in the province.

The findings demonstrate how international investment in astronomy research infrastructure can stimulate economic development to benefit the region closest to the infrastructure.

With a creative approach and some careful considerations, the smaller, less technically stringent projects can be successfully executed (parts manufactured and supplied, labour sourced and managed) all using the resources available in the Northern Cape, says Ziyaad Halday, SARAO project manager for HERA.

This strategy facilitates employment and spending in sectors that are not the provinces main financial drivers, such as mining and agriculture.

South Africa, through SARAO, has contributed significantly to the HERA collaboration by providing the human resources required for managing the project locally, and employing the workers needed for building, operating and maintaining the infrastructure.

Over the course of seven years, SARAO says the construction of HERA on the telescope site has created employment for 24 individuals, who were mostly recruited from Carnarvon.

It says the co-hosting of astronomy infrastructure such as HERA can have additional benefits for local communities through employment opportunities that arise from construction of the instrument to the maintenance needed following the construction phase.

South Africa has become a destination of choice for the hosting of international astronomy infrastructure, says Dr Bonita de Swardt, SARAO programme manager for strategic partnerships for human capital development and author of the report.

This includes smaller astronomy telescopes, instruments and experiments in astronomy that can be easily plugged into the existing infrastructure on operational sites.

HERA represents only one of these co-hosted instruments for an international collaboration of scientists. The impact study shows how SA can benefit from smaller scale, co-hosted instrumentation through business development, to the employment it can create for people living in some of the most impoverished and rural geographical areas in the country.

On a national level, the impact study found there is growing participation of South African researchers in the HERA collaboration.

This was mainly a result of continuous financial support towards masters and doctoral scholarships, in conjunction with the award of postdoctoral research fellowships supported by SARAOs human capital development programme and collaborating universities, the organisation says.

These initiatives were supported throughout the construction of HERA, which has led to increased participation of researchers based at local universities in the collaboration, ensuring SAs representation in world-class research conducted with this instrument, it concludes.

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HERA telescope shows benefits of radio astronomy in SA - ITWeb

Two First Nations astronomers are working to show Indigenous children they can pursue their astronomy dreams through an Australian National University program.

The ANU last week hosted a week-long program with Indigenous high school students from remote regional NSW and Tasmania to give them first-hand experience of Indigenous astronomy.

Hosted at the Mt Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, the program provided year 10 and 11 students with a chance to work with ANU masters students, Gamilaraay-Yuwaalaraay man Peter Swanton and Gamilaroi astronomer and science communicator Karlie Moon.

Being mentored by professional astronomers, students built smart phone devices to measure the chemical make-up of light and undertook remote observation at Siding Spring Observatory.

Weaved through the program was an exploration of Indigenous interpretations of the night sky to inform navigation, calendars, and predicting the weather.

ASTRO 3D education and outreach manager Delese Brewster was designed to inspire the next-generation of First Nation astronomers, researchers and scientists.

This group is under-represented in astronomy and we need to provide a pipeline that will encourage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students into tertiary study, she said.

Mr Swanton said the program improved visibility for Indigenous children interested in the field.

I never had this when I was going through school, he said.

It felt quite disengaging when I went to high school, as I had no role models.

I never had someone in front of me, that looked like me, that talked like me

Mr Swanton said he enjoyed seeing children take part in the program.

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Indigenous astronomers helping next-gen First Nations scientists reach for the stars - National Indigenous Times

We now know of more than 5,000 exoplanets beyond the solar system. What we really understand about each of these worlds, though, is barely anything at all. Most of them have been seen only indirectly from their shadows as they cross in front of the stars they orbit. The few that researchers have managed to actually take a picture ofthat is, to directly image using light emanating from the planets themselvesappear as little more than monochromatic dots even in the very best current telescopes. And so far all of those directly imaged worlds are among the brightest, largest and least Earth-like exoplanets known.

The far future may be a different matter. How detailed could a picture of a distant exoplanet beespecially one that is small and rocky like Earth? The answer is that someday astronomers could obtain images revealing continents, clouds, oceans, ice caps and even vegetation on some remote Earth-like world orbiting an alien star.

The problem is that the most powerful telescope for this task cant be builtnot exactly, anyway. Instead it must be conjured into existence using the tenets of Einsteins general theory of relativity to transform our sun itself into a star-sized magnifying glass. Albert Einsteins key insightthat gravity can be understood as the curvature of spacetimemeans that stars and other massive objects act as natural gravitational lenses that warp and amplify the light from background objects.

Astronomers today routinely use galaxies and galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses, but the prospect of using this technique for our sun poses so many challenges that few researchers have taken it seriously. Most notably, the approach requires precisely positioning a conventional telescopesomething like Hubble, for instanceat the point where any given targets lens-amplified light comes to a focus. For the sun, those focal points are found at the extreme outskirts of the solar systemat least 14 times farther out than Pluto.

Now a new study by astronomers at Stanford University shows that a simplifying shortcut could exist for the still arduous task of imaging exoplanets using our sun as a cosmic telescope. The study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, suggests astronomers could eventually achieve exoplanet imaging with a resolution 1,000 times greater than that of the Event Horizon Telescope, which has been used to capture the historic first images of supermassive black holes. Its just neat to think of this as kind of the ultimate end game of the process of studying exoplanets, says Bruce Macintosh, a Stanford astrophysicist, who co-authored the paper, or at least the end game short of actually visiting them.

Alex Madurowicz, Macintoshs co-author and graduate student, first fed real satellite images of Earth into a computer model that reduced our world to how it might appear if it was seen from afar through a stellar gravitational lens. In most circumstances, the resulting image would be an Einstein ringa distorted, circular smear produced by the planets light curving around the lensing star. Earlier work by another researcher, Slava Turyshev of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had shown that correcting those distortions would require methodically moving a light-gathering conventional telescope back and forth within the focal region at the solar systems edge. The resulting pixel-by-pixel scan of the planets warped projection, somehow choreographed from Earth upward of 80 billion kilometers away, could take thousands of hours and consume enormous amounts of fuel.

Madurowicz and Macintosh realized that this harsh calculus could change, however, given that the sun is slightly oblong rather than perfectly spherical. That minor detail means that if the target exoplanet aligns perfectly with the suns equator as seen from the focal-region telescope, the product is not an Einstein ring but a crossfour asymmetrical copies of the planet around the suns perimeter. Madurowicz found that, by exploiting this asymmetry, the scanning process to reconstruct a target exoplanets undistorted image could be eliminated. You dont have to move [your telescope] around inside the image, he says. You can just stay in one spot.

Turyshev, who was not a part of this latest study, is skeptical that the painstaking process of scanning he first described can actually be eliminated. The idealized technique for image reconstruction that Macintosh and Madurowicz propose, he says, would have to overcome possible interference arising from the brightness of our sun and its seething outer atmosphere, known as the corona. It would be nice if the sun would just be dark, right? Turyshev says. But it is not, of course, and even the best equipment could not fully block a fraction of it from trickling into a telescope, especially one staring directly at our star. Their paper is wonderful, but its a theory, he adds.

Even if the scanning process could be eliminated, there are other limitations to consider as well. Each exoplanet targeted for solar gravitational lensing would likely require its own dedicated Hubble-like space telescope sent to and operated at the solar systems outer limits. For example, for such an observatory to image a second exoplanet just 10 degrees off from its original target, it would need to shift its position around the sun by more than 14 billion kilometers. To use a solar gravitational lens, you need to line up the telescope, the sun and the planet extremely precisely, Madurowicz says. There would be no way for a single telescope to image more than one planet, or one star system with several interesting worlds, at a time.

This limitation is the reason Jean Schneider, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, has his eye on a different, perhaps more feasible alternative to solar gravitational lensing: the hypertelescope. This broad concept envisions the detection of surface features of exoplanets through the use of space-based fleets of many meter-scale mirrors flying in formation to create virtual telescopes larger than any single one ever could be. Schneider agrees direct images of potential extraterrestrial vegetation would be precious and would provide insights unavailable through any other known method of remote observation.

Aki Roberge, an astrophysicist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, points out that astronomers dont even know if there is another world like our own out there at all. Not just Earth-size, she says, but Earth-like, with oceans, continents, an atmosphere and a biosphere. And direct imaging, it seems, is the only way to really find out.

A proposed observatory recommended in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicines report Pathways to Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2020s, otherwise known as the Astro2020 Decadal Survey, may offer the best near-term hope of giving Roberge and her peers the answers they need. The survey serves as a once-a-decade roadmap guiding U.S. astronomy. And topping its latest roadmap is a concept for a space telescope with a mirror more than six meters wide, something of a super Hubble tuned for gathering optical, infrared and ultraviolet light that is intended for launch as soon as the early 2040s.

According to Astro2020s recommendations, one of the core capabilities of such a telescope would be directly imaging a diversity of exoplanets with the key objective of studying their atmospheres to make better guesses about their environmental conditions. From there, astronomers might determine if the chemical necessities or by-products of life as we know it water, organic compounds, free oxygen, and so onexist on any of the targeted worlds. The fuzzy blobs that might be imaged by this proposed telescope could be the first small step toward truly knowing an exoplanets potential to harbor life. Only after such a mission, most astronomers say, could we make the giant leap of building a hypertelescope or exploiting the solar gravitational lens to get detailed surface images. We have a path to the 2040s. After that, its the Wild West, Roberge says.

Despite the far-out nature of the solar gravitational lens, Turyshev, Macintosh and Madurowicz are of one mind: thinking about its possibilities now is worthwhile. Already, advances in solar sails and other unconventional propulsion technologies offer the possibility of expediting the requisite journey to the solar systems outermost reaches. The challenges remain daunting, but using our star as the ultimate telescope may be closer to reality than anyone now suspects. By anticipating the theoretical and practical limits of the approach, whenor ifit finally lies within our grasp, the question will not have to be Can we do this? but rather What planets should we image?

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Our Sun Could Someday Reveal the Surfaces of Alien Earths - Scientific American