Category Archives: Astronomy

Maunakea. PC: University of Hawaii Hilo

The decommissioning of the California Institute of Technology Submillimeter Observatory on University of Hawaii-managed lands on Maunakea will be completed by the end of 2022, according to aFebruary 10 news releasefrom CSO.

The Hawaii State Board of Land and Natural Resources unanimously approved a conservation district use permit on Jan. 14, 2022 for the removal and site restoration of the CSO observatory.

CSO is one of two Maunakea telescopes currently in the final stages of the decommissioning process, established in the Maunakea Comprehensive Management Plan. The UH Hilo Hk Kea Telescope is on track to be decommissioned in 2023.

The decommissioning of these first two observatories will be milestones in the stewardship of the mauna, said Greg Chun, executive director of the UH HiloCenter for Maunakea Stewardship. This is a very thorough process as a lot of work went into the development of the CMP more than a decade ago, which guides our management of Maunakea.

CMS is responsible for administering the BLNR approved CMP along with the new Maunakea Master Plan, approved by the UH Board of Regents in January 2022, and the administrative rules.

The new Master Plan set a limit of nine operating astronomy facilities on Maunakea by 2033. Five of the 14 astronomy sites will be closed permanently to astronomy development once the existing facilities there have been decommissioned.

More broadly, the Master Plan serves as a framework for aligning land-use decisions consistent with UHs mission and purpose. The administrative rules cover public and commercial activities.

The CMP addresses activities like cultural, natural, and scientific resource protection, education and outreach, permitting and compliance, infrastructure and maintenance, construction activities, operations, and monitoring. The CMP has four sub-planspublic access, cultural resources management, natural resources management and observatory decommissioning that further specify those activities. According to the decommissioning sub-plan, the Maunakea Observatories are responsible for the cost of decommissioning.

The CDUP for CSO sets the terms and conditions required for decommissioning. As part of the process, CSO has completed an archeological assessment, a cultural setting analysis, a hydrogeological evaluation, a biological inventory, a biological setting analysis, a traffic analysis and an asbestos/lead paint/mold survey.

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Maunakea telescope to be decommissioned this summer - Maui Now

ONEILL A course for anyone with an interest in the night (or daytime) sky will be offered by Northeast Community College in ONeill later this month.

The class, Astronomy: Beginning Observational Astronomy/Atmospheric Optics (HORC 5110/22S and CRN No. 70214) meets Monday, Feb. 28, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., in Room 132 in the Northeast Community College Extended Campus in ONeill, 505 East Highway 20.

With instructor Mark Urwiller, participants will explore concepts of celestial mechanics, types of objects to view day or night and equipment that can be used to view the sky. The class will help participants enjoy the sky without special equipment, use the equipment they already have or select equipment to buy if they want to take their interest to the next level.

Participants are asked to bring a laptop, tablet or smartphone, if available. They are not required.

Pre-registration is required. To register, call Northeast Community College in O'Neill at 402-336-3590.

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Beginning astronomy course to be offered at Northeast in O'Neill - Norfolk Daily News

An artists rendition of a red supergiant star transitioning into a Type II supernova, emitting a violent eruption of radiation and gas on its dying breath before collapsing and exploding. Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko

Its another first for astronomy.

For the first time, a team of astronomers have imaged in real-time as a red supergiant star reached the end of its life. They watched as the star convulsed in its death throes before finally exploding as a supernova.

And their observations contradict previous thinking into how red supergiants behave before they blow up.

An artists impression of a red supergiant star in the final year of its life emitting a tumultuous cloud of gas. This suggests at least some of these stars undergo significant internal changes before going supernova. Credit: W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko

A team of astronomers watched the drama unfold through the eyes of two observatories in Hawaii: Pan-STARRS on Haleakala, Maui, and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii Island. Their observations were part of the Young Supernova Experiment (YSE) transient survey. They watched the supernova explosion, named SN 2020tlf, during the final 130 days leading up to its detonation.

For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode! Wynn Jacobson-Galn, UC Berkeley

The title of the paper presenting the discovery is Final Moments. I. Precursor Emission, Envelope Inflation, and Enhanced Mass Loss Preceding the Luminous Type II Supernova 2020tlf. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal and the lead author is Wynn Jacobson-Galn, an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at UC Berkeley.

This is a breakthrough in our understanding of what massive stars do moments before they die, said Jacobson-Galn, in a press release. Direct detection of pre-supernova activity in a red supergiant star has never been observed before in an ordinary Type II supernova. For the first time, we watched a red supergiant star explode!

Its like watching a ticking time-bomb. Raffaella Margutti, UC Berkeley

The discovery dates back to the Summer of 2020. At that time, the progenitor star experienced a dramatic rise in luminosity. Pan-STARRS detected that brightening, and when Fall came around the star exploded as SN 2020tlf. The supernova is a Type II supernova, where a massive star experiences a rapid collapse and then explodes.

This video is an artists rendition of the red supergiant star transitioning into a Type II supernova, emitting a violent eruption of radiation and gas on its dying breath before collapsing and exploding. Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko

The team used the Keck Observatorys Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (LRIS) to capture the supernovas first spectrum. The LRIS data showed circumstellar material around the star when it exploded. That material is likely what Pan-STARRS saw the star ejecting in the summer before it exploded.

Keck was instrumental in providing direct evidence of a massive star transitioning into a supernova explosion, said senior author Raffaella Margutti, an associate professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. Its like watching a ticking time bomb. Weve never confirmed such violent activity in a dying red supergiant star where we see it produce such a luminous emission, then collapse and combust, until now.

This figure from the study shows the supernova pre- and post-explosion. The top panel shows the total of all electromagnetic radiation emitted by the event across all wavelengths, in green. The middle panel shows black-body temperatures in red, and the bottom panel shows the radii in blue. Image Credit: Jacobson-Galn et al, 2022

After the explosion, the team turned to other Keck instruments to continue their observations. Data from the DEep Imaging and Multi-Object Spectrograph (DEIMOS) and Near Infrared Echellette Spectrograph (NIRES) showed that the progenitor star was 10 times more massive than the Sun. The star is in the NGC 5731 galaxy about 120 million light-years away.

The teams observations led to some new insight into Type II supernovae and their progenitor stars. Prior to these observations, nobody had seen a red supergiant display such a spike in luminosity and undergo such powerful eruptions before exploding. They were much more placid in their final days as if they accepted their fates.

Red supergiant stars eject material prior to core collapse. But that material ejection takes place on much longer timescales than SN 2020tlf. This supernova emitted circumstellar material (CSM) for 130 days prior to collapse, and that makes it a bit of a puzzle. The bright flash prior to the stars explosion is somehow related to the ejected CSM, but the team of researchers isnt certain how they all interacted.

Artists impression of a Type II supernova explosion which involves the destruction of a massive supergiant star. Credit: ESO

The significant variability in the star leading up to collapse is puzzling. The powerful burst of light coming from the star prior to exploding suggests that something unknown happens in its internal structure. Whatever those changes are, they result in a mammoth ejection of gas before the star collapsed and exploded.

In their paper, the authors discuss what may have caused the ejection of gas. One possibility is wave-driven mass loss, which occurs in the late stages of stellar evolution. It occurs when the excitation of gravitational waves by oxygen or neon burning in the final years before SN can allow for the injection of energy into the outer stellar layers, resulting in an inflated envelope and/or eruptive mass-loss episodes, they write. But current wave-driven models dont match the progenitor stars ejection of gas. Theyre consistent with the progenitor stars radius in its last 130 days, but not consistent with the burst of luminosity.

In the conclusion of their paper, the authors sum things up succinctly. Given the progenitor mass range derived from nebular spectra, it is likely that the enhanced mass loss and precursor emission are the results of instabilities deeply rooted in the stellar interior, most likely associated with the final nuclear burning stages. Energy deposition from either gravitational waves generated in neon/oxygen burning stages or a silicon flash in the progenitors final ?130 days could have ejected stellar material that was then detected in both pre-explosion flux and the early-time SN spectrum.

If theres one supernova that behaves like this, there must be more. The teams findings mean that surveys like the Young Supernova Experiment transient survey now have a way to find more of them in the future. If the survey finds more stars ejecting material like this one, then they know to keep an eye on it to see if it collapses and explodes.

I am most excited by all of the new unknowns that have been unlocked by this discovery, said Jacobson-Galn. Detecting more events like SN 2020tlf will dramatically impact how we define the final months of stellar evolution, uniting observers and theorists in the quest to solve the mystery of how massive stars spend the final moments of their lives.

Originally published on Universe Today.

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Astronomers Watch a Star Die and Then Explode as a Supernova For the Very First Time - SciTechDaily

We already knew the asteroid 130 Elektra was special. Astronomers previously discovered it had two moons, making it a rare triple asteroid system. Now a third moon may have been found, making it even more uncommon the first-known quadruple asteroid in the solar system.

Elektra was first discovered in 1873, orbiting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Oblong-shaped and 160 miles across on its longest side, it is a relatively large asteroid and completes an orbit of the sun every five years.

In 2003, the first moon was discovered orbiting Elektra, and in 2014 a second. The discoveries were interesting, but not unusual more than 150 asteroids are known to have one or two moons, in the same way planets can have moons that are gravitationally bound to them. Multiple moons can be found around large asteroids, said Bin Yang, an astronomer from the European Southern Observatory in Chile who discovered Elektras second moon. A NASA mission, DART, is on target to collide with one such asteroids moon later in the year.

But until now, an asteroid with three moons has eluded astronomers. Anthony Berdeu from the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand and colleagues used images from the Very Large Telescope (V.L.T.) in Chile to take a closer look at Elektra, and they found evidence for a previously hidden moon inside the orbits of the other two.

This is the first asteroid with three moons, Dr. Berdeu said. We are pretty confident. Its quite exciting.

Their results were published Tuesday in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

At a paltry one mile across, the moon would be slightly smaller than its siblings at 1.2 and 3.7 miles across. It swings around Elektra once every 16 hours at a distance of only 220 miles. To an observer standing on the third moons surface, Elektra would loom large in the sky.

Dr. Berdeu says he was able to find the moon using a new algorithm to eke out its extremely faint light in images taken by the V.L.T. The data reduction techniques employed by the algorithm allowed for a sharper image of Elektra and its surroundings.

Dr. Yang, who was not involved in this paper, said that she and other astronomers had been trying to look for quadruple systems for a while, and that her team also saw tantalizing hints of this third moon in their studies of 130 Elektra. This discovery would be a very exciting result, she said, although further observations will be needed to confirm the moons existence.

Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer from Queens University Belfast who was also not involved in the paper, says the moons are most likely chunks of Elektra that were broken off in a collision when another object smashed into the asteroid in the past. They all look like theyre from the same material, he said.

Further study of this system could reveal the stability of such multi-moon asteroids. This third moons orbit is misaligned to the other two, something thats very strange, Dr. Berdeu said. Dr. Yang said that she thought the system was unstable and that the inner moons may eventually fall back onto Elektra.

It could also tell us more about the formation of multi-moon asteroids. This new finding will inspire modelers to look at asteroid impact formation, and try to set a limit on how many moons an impact can form, Dr. Yang said. How many moons can a system really sustain?

Further studies are expected to unearth more quadruple systems too. New telescopes, such as the Extremely Large Telescope currently being built in Chile, will have the observing power necessary to more easily spot these multi-moon asteroid systems.

And astronomers may not stop at quadruple asteroids. There is no limit to what we can find, Dr. Berdeu said. We expect to find more quadruple systems, and why not quintuple or sextuple.

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The First Quadruple Asteroid: Astronomers Spot a Space Rock With 3 Moons - The New York Times

Home Lifestyle This $74K Astronomy Watch Aims to Liberate the Mind; Shows Earth, Sun, Moons Positions

Horologist Ulysse Nardin claims its Moonstruck design features reinvented mechanics that will reproduce the suns trajectory and lunar cycles in a simple-to-decrypt face. Hmm.

In a few words, the Blast Moonstruck is an elaborate analog watch. Through its combination of highly specialized intricacies, the astronomical watch provides wearers with info about the solar position, lunar phase, and, conveniently the time at a glance.

High-end wristwatches are nothing new. And the most sought-after iterations tend to be analog. Horology is a mechanistic art form that is incredibly complex, and, as a result, I find myself wedged halfway down any rabbit hole that Ive attempted on the subject.

So when I read the press release telling me that this bourgie idea of a ticker set in motion the primordial elements of the visible celestial mechanisms so that everyone can gain a poetic understanding, I was three things: very lost, very skeptical, and very, very curious.

Heres what I figured out. And, presumably, what you need to know.

Its makers boast the timepiece as a scientific representation of considerable oneiric potential (dreamlike I had to look that one up, too). According to the brand, the watchs solar and lunar indicators provide great leaders (but also sailors) with the information needed to predict the spring tides.

A top-down view with the North Pole at the center of the dial and a domed sapphire crystal make observers feel as if they are at the center of the cosmos, the Ulysse Nardin team says.

A three-dimensional sun begins its cycle at 12 oclock and an aventurine disk stands in as the night sky. That disk, by some magnificent gear train, plays out the moons phases and completes a full rotation every 24 hours.

Similarly, the sun completes its rotation along the Moonstrucks 18-carat rose gold outer bezel every 29.5 days.

Speaking of material makeup, the case comprises black ceramic and DLC titanium. Customers can choose from black alligator, black velvet, or black rubber straps. But as the saying goes, in for a penny, in for the full alligator leather.

A simple winding crown adjusts the time, and two rectangular buttons operate the dual-time setting function. See the full list of the tickers functions and specs below.

To learn more and place an order for the $73,900 Blast Moonstruck, head to ulysse-nardin.com.

Citizens Promaster series is legendary. Their solar-powered diver has been featured not once, but twice here on GearJunkie. So, when the makers of this fan-favorite announced that their latest model had sprouted legs and climbed out of the sea, we were immediately intrigued. Read more

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This $74K Astronomy Watch Aims to 'Liberate the Mind'; Shows Earth, Sun, Moon's Positions - GearJunkie

Laniakea Supercluster superimposed on orbits and surfaces of mass density. Credit: University of Hawaii

Everything in our universe moves, but the timescales needed to see motion are often vastly greater than human lifetimes. In a major new study, a team of astronomers from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), University of Maryland and University of Paris-Saclay has traced the movement of 10,000 galaxies and clusters of galaxies, the dominant congregations of matter, within 350 million light-years. Their motions are followed throughout a span of 11.5 billion years from the galaxies origins when the universe was only 1.5 billion-years-old, until today, at an age of more than 13 billion years.

The study has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Using a mathematical technique called numerical action method, the team has computed these paths based on the present brightness and positions of galaxies, and their present motion away from us. The astronomers have factored in the physics of the Big Bang theory, including the idea that galaxies initially start out expanding from each other almost precisely at what is called the Hubble expansion rate. Throughout time, gravity alters galaxy motions, so they are not just moving apart as the universe expands, but are drawn together into filaments, walls and clusters, while also emptying out other regions that are now voids. Over the eons of time, galaxies typically deviate from pure Hubble rate expansion by millions of light-years over a billion years. In regions of high density, the galaxy orbits can become quite complicated and involve collisions and mergers.

Slice of local universe showing orbits that galaxies have followed in white and contours of regions of high density in shades of yellow-orange. Milky Way (near center) Great Attractor core of Laniakea Supercluster (left) Perseus-Pisces (right). Credit: University of Hawaii

We are bringing into focus the detailed formation history of large-scale mass structures in the universe by reverse engineering the gravitational interactions that created them, said Ed Shaya, Associate Research Scientist at the University of Maryland.

There are several particularly interesting vast regions of high matter and galaxy density the astronomers explore. One, which has been called the Great Attractor, is the core of the Laniakea Supercluster, an immense supercluster of galaxies containing our own Milky Way. Galaxies can be seen flowing toward a location within a nest of four rich clusters.

Milky Way Galaxy. Credit: Thomas Ciszewski

A second fascinating region is in the adjacent Perseus-Pisces filament of galaxies, which stretches for nearly a billion light-years and is one of the largest known structures in the universe. The vicinity of the Virgo Cluster, the closest large cluster, is also seen, and can be studied in detail because it is nearby.

For more than 30 years, astronomers have considered a Great Attractor to be the primary source of gravity that makes the whole region near us move with a high peculiar velocity relative to uniform cosmic expansion, but the nature of that source has been obscure, said R. Brent Tully, an astronomer at IfA who co-authored the study. Our orbit reconstructions have provided the first good look at this previously enigmatic region.

Across the entire expanse, the orbits can be projected into the future as well. The accelerating expansion of the universe dominates the overall picture, causing most galaxies to move apart. However, some coalescence and merging will continue in localized regions.

A video of the paths of galaxies in this vast region, starting from the epoch of early galaxy formation and continuing until the universe is almost twice as old can be viewed here. On the large scales depicted in this simulation, only a few major mergers, all in very dense regions, are seen to occur in the next 10 billion years.

The technical article is accompanied by four interactive models. and four videos:

Reference: Galaxy flows within 8,000 km/s from Numerical Action methods by Edward Shaya, R. Brent Tully, Daniel Pomarde and Alan Peel, Accepted, The Astrophysical Journal.DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac4f66arXiv:2201.12315

The research team is composed of Shaya (University of Maryland), Tully (University of Hawaii), Daniel Pomarede (University of Paris-Saclay) and Alan Peel (University of Maryland).

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Astronomers Trace the Movement of 10,000 Galaxies Over the Last 11.5 Billion Years - SciTechDaily

When a massive star dies at the end of its life, the core collapses to form either a very dense neutron star or a black hole. At the same time, the outer layers of the star are explosively launched into space by the colossal energy generated in the core collapse. The blast wave is so powerful that the expanding debris lights up with as much energy as billions upon billions of times the energy emitted by the Sun, and in fact can outshine an entire galaxy.

A supernova is born. But not all supernovae are created equal.

Some are far more powerful than others. The description above is ridiculously oversimplified here's a somewhat more detail explanation, and more technical ones can easily be found online and changing conditions from star to star can change the way one explodes. It can depend on things like having a binary star companion or not, the mass of the star when it explodes, the mass it had when it was born, how much of its outer layers blow off before the explosion, and more.

Still, there are supernovae that are exceptional even in this bewildering variety of explosions, and they can be very hard to explain. One in particular stands out, and astronomers think they can now explain what happened.

On June 16, 2018, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System detected a supernova in a galaxy roughly 200 million light years away. The naming convention for these events dubbed it AT2018cow, and because astronomers are dorks just like everyone else it was known thereafter as the COW.

Other observatories were alerted and started watching it as well, and as the data came in astronomers were surprised to see just how luminous this explosion was 100 billion times brighter than the Sun! This puts it in the rare class of superluminous supernovae, ones which are far more powerful than average.

But it also acted weirdly. It rose in brightness much faster than usual as well. Most supernovae take about two weeks before hitting peak luminosity, but this one rose in brightness by a factor of 100 in a single day. It also faded much more rapidly than typical supernovae as well. The COW's color in early days was blue, so this new type of event was called a Fast Blue Optical Transient, or FBOT. I wrote a synopsis of all this not long after it happened, if you want the details.

In the years since there has been a lot of work trying to figure out how to make a star explode like this, with limited success. Ideas have included the birth of a super-magnetized neutron star called a magnetar, or a white dwarf torn apart by a black hole (!!), and more. But now a team of astronomers thinks they have the answer (link to paper).

Sometimes, in the millennia or even years before the final explosion, massive stars can blow a lot of their outer layers away. Sometimes it's slow Betelgeuse, for example, blows out a slow dense wind of matter and sometimes it's more violent. This material surrounds the pre-supernova star so it's called the circumstellar matter.

We have physical models for how the interiors of such stars behave, equations that can be solved to understand what's happening deep inside a star. These can then be used to see what happens when the star explodes, and try to match the energies emitted to what's actually observed.

The astronomers modeled the COW as a very massive star, one born with a whopping 80 times the mass of the Sun. That's huge, and it's very rare for stars to get this big. Such a star loses much of its hydrogen outer layers during its life, blowing them away to great distance.

What's left is a still-crushingly-hefty core 42 times the Sun's mass that's mostly helium. At this point the star's core is fusing ever-heavier elements in its very center, layered like an onion. Some of that helium on the surface is blown into space as well, and the best model fit to the observations indicates about half a solar mass was surrounding the core when it blew up. That's less than in some cases, but still about 150,000 times the mass of the Earth.

The core is so massive a very bad thing happened deep inside it. When it started fusing oxygen into silicon the reaction is so energetic it produces super-high-energy gamma rays, the highest energy form of light. These gamma rays in part support the core against its own immense gravity, heating the interior enough to keep it inflated.

But gamma rays at these energies are unstable. They can spontaneously convert themselves into matter, an electron and anti-electron, a process called pair production. This steals away energy supporting the core, so gravity squeezes it, making it smaller. The temperature goes up, the core expands a bit, and finds equilibrium again. Until, that is, gamma rays start converting again, and the process repeats. This causes the core to pulsate, which helps it blow material off its surface.

At this point its life can now be measured in days, maybe weeks. Helium blows off its surface, and the pulsations get bigger and bigger, until finally as it always does in the end gravity wins. The core collapses, the temperature screams way up, and it explodes.

The total energy released in just a few days is truly staggering, as much as the Sun gives off over its entire 10 billion year lifetime. The blast wave from this titanic explosion slams into the previously ejected helium, lighting it up. If there had been a lot of this material around the star, more than the mass of the Sun, it would've taken many days to light it up and even longer for it to fade. But because it was only half a solar mass it brightened and faded rapidly.

The astronomers find that their model reproduces that rapid change in brightness of the first 20 days of the supernova pretty well. After that, the usual sort of supernova models work, with about 0.6 solar masses of radioactive nickel created in the nuclear furnace decaying into cobalt, generating so much light it explains the supernova's brightness thereafter.

Interestingly, they find that the total energy of the explosion doesn't affect the brightness over time what astronomers call a light curve very much at all, but what really dominates here is the material around the star, its shape, and its density. That's the key to understanding these fast supernovae.

For truly massive stars, over 100 times the mass of the Sun, the core explosion is so violent it tears itself apart completely, leaving nothing behind. In this case it may have left a black hole or a magnetar, and material falling back on this object may explain the brightness many weeks after the explosion. But the first few weeks are dominated by the circumstellar matter.

Now that these models exist it'll be interesting to see how they apply to any future such FBOT supernovae. Fitting a specific case is one thing, but generalizing it to be able to explain others is a strong indication that they're doing something right.

See the article here:

Bad Astronomy | The supernova AT2018cow may finally be explained | SYFY WIRE - SYFY WIRE

One of the girls asked Mitchell if she might enroll in the school. Raised like most Quakers to oppose slavery, Mitchell knew that recently debate had raged in Nantuckets white community about the radical notion of integrating the islands public school. Slavery had been banned in Massachusetts since the 1780s, but government, business, and education carefully kept free Black people on the lowest rung of the social ladder. When she met the girls hopeful gazes and told them yes, they could enroll, Mitchell knew that uproar might follow.

Mitchell was just 17 then, but she would go on to be the first female astronomer in the United States and one of the first in the world. Part of what Maria Mitchell did, says astrophysicist and University of New Hampshire assistant professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, was give us a model of a community-engaged astronomer. She never thought she should just shut up and calculate. Mitchell was principled in her views and not timid about sharing them. She had a sense of responsibility to the broader community, from the importance of educating Black girls during a time of intense segregation to her subsequent persistent advocacy for women in science.

Today, 133 years after her death, Mitchells legacy continues in institutions such as the Maria Mitchell Observatory on her native Nantucket, where director Regina Jorgenson conducts research on galaxy formation and directs an outreach program targeting students from underserved communities. Maria Mitchell was very much ahead of her time, Jorgenson says. Learning by doing was her foundational philosophy. While this is fairly common pedagogical practice today, it was not at all at that time.

The observatorys research program, once women-only, is now mixed-gender but still women-dominated. Which, adds Jorgenson, is extremely unusual, if not unique, in American astrophysics. One in 20 female astronomers in the country has passed through the observatory in some fashion, creating a community of women tied together by the legacy of Maria Mitchell.

White society was not torpedoed by the education of three Black girls, it turned out, and Mitchell soon moved to other fields. She did not attend college (few colleges accepted women at that time), but within a year, she was hired as librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum. Many cities boasted an athenaeum (named for Athena, the Olympian goddess of wisdom), a combination of a subscription library, nexus of important periodicals, and lecture venue. (Many, such as Nantuckets and Bostons, still flourish.) Mitchell worked there for two decades. She spent spare hours devouring books and periodicals about astronomy and mathematics, while teaching herself French and German.

William Mitchell, her father, held many jobs over the years, from clerk of the Nantucket Society of Friends to banker, schoolmaster, and legislator. He even set chronometers for whaling captains who required an accurate timepiece for determining longitude. But the constant for him and his family was astronomy.

His daughters talents in this field were recognized early. Beginning in childhood as her fathers assistant, Maria grew ever more adept as an astronomer which flowered into her great passion in life. By the age of 12 she was charting eclipses from the awkward little platform perched astride their steep roof.

When William was hired in 1836 as director of Pacific Bank, the job included a spacious penthouse apartment above the bank. Its flat slate roof made it easier for him and his daughter to build another observatory. For the next 11 years, she peered at the sky on most clear nights.

She had been precisely monitoring successive quadrants of the sky for years when, on October 1, 1847, the Mitchells hosted a party. It was a clear and cool night. After tea she said to the guests and her family, Now, you must excuse me. The heavens are so clear I want to sweep the skies. Who knows what comets may be roaming at large?

Maria donned a coat and climbed up to the roof. She peered yet again at a familiar corner of the sky but this time she saw something new. She went downstairs and told her father what she thought she had found.

Soon partygoers heard William race downstairs from the roof. With his observing cap still pulled low over his eyes, he tore open the parlor door and exclaimed, Maria has found a telescopic comet!

He wrote immediately to various authorities to establish her priority. Soon the director of the US Coast Survey was writing, We congratulate the indefatigable comet seeker most heartily on her success; is she not the first lady who has ever discovered a comet?

She was not, but it was a rare achievement nonetheless. For millennia, these visitors to the night sky had been regarded as celestial omens, and this one bode well for Maria Mitchell. Soon popularly called Miss Mitchells Comet (now designated C/1847 T1), it is not a periodic visitor to the solar system, unlike the comets Halley or Hale-Bopp.

At 30, Mitchell began to receive the scientific accolades that would continue for the rest of her life. She was the first American astronomer to discover a comet. Soon Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and later to most of the previously all-male institutions, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She became quite famous, publicly supporting feminism and abolition when it would have been easier to not do so. When Frederick Douglass first spoke to a large mixed-race audience on Nantucket in 1841, she was present, and her work was honored at the Seneca Falls Womans Rights Convention in 1848.

When Vassar College opened its doors in 1865, Mitchell was there as its first professor of astronomy (paid considerably less than her male colleagues). She was 47 and among the first generation of astronomers who were also college professors a marriage of commitments that left her exhausted.

She was hugely popular with students even revered. They helped her chart sunspots and eclipses. We are women studying together, she would say to launch a class. She objected to numerical grading but gave rigorous math tests. Astronomy is not stargazing, she insisted. The laws which govern the motions of the sun, the earth, planets, and other bodies in the universe cannot be understood and demonstrated without a solid basis of mathematical learning.

And Mitchell treated her students as serious scholars. One student wrote of her time at Vassar: I have Miss Mitchell and all these grand instruments and no one here makes fun of it at all. But when I go home no one there will take any interest in astronomy. Do you think I shall be brave enough then to hold on tight to what I have begun?

Mitchell died in 1889. In 1935, a century after she opened that school for girls, her admiring colleagues in the field named a lunar crater after her.

Thirteen years after Mitchells death, Nantucketers formed the Maria Mitchell Association to preserve her legacy as a scientist and teacher, which was meant, in part, to help female students study astronomy and hold on tight to what they began. Now the association operates two observatories, a museum at the original Mitchell home on Vestal Street where Maria and her father observed the constellations from their roof and an aquarium, providing many programs for scientists and the public.

Regina Jorgenson has been director of the Maria Mitchell Observatory since 2016. She began her career with a fellowship that enabled her to travel around the world and meet with women in astronomy to research the effect of different cultures on womens potential in science. This is a unique position for an astronomer, because it is not at an academic institute. It combines the three things I love: research, working with students, and doing public outreach.

Under Jorgensons leadership, the observatory focuses on mentoring underrepresented groups at crucial stages in their careers. Thus, the array of students and speakers is quite different than in Mitchells time. Prescod-Weinstein, who gave a lecture for the Maria Mitchell Association last July on her research into dark matter, writes about astronomy and physics within the context of her experience as a Black woman who is also agender, representing an intersection of groups that for centuries have deliberately been excluded from science.

Prescod-Weinstein says that her night sky looks very different from Maria Mitchells. Mitchell was born in 1818, before the adoption of trains, telegraphy, even photography. She could watch for comets from atop a bank in bustling downtown Nantucket. Prescod-Weinstein was born in smoggy Los Angeles, 164 years after Mitchell and after an industrial revolution accelerated climate change. My concept of the night sky was that at night it turned orange, because you were seeing the sodium lights reflected in the sky. She could scarcely see any stars.

Prescod-Weinstein is now an astrophysicist, and an assistant professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire. Her primary research is in the intersection of particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology (the science of the origin and development of the universe). She writes a monthly column, Field Notes from Spacetime, for New Scientist, and contributes columns to Physics World. And, she teaches the next generation of astronomers and physicists.

In 1835, the three little girls from the Cape Verdean community could attend teenage Marias first school, but when Mitchell became an astronomy professor at Vassar, they would not have been allowed to enroll. Prescod-Weinstein is acutely aware of the loss of stories such as theirs. Even in the worst conditions, she writes in her book, The Disordered Cosmos, Black women have looked up at the night sky and wondered. Those women whose names I do not know, who may or may not be part of my bloodline, are as much my intellectual ancestors as Isaac Newton is.

Prescod-Weinsteins mother is Barbadian and her Ashkenazi father was raised in part in Trinidad. Like Mitchell, Prescod-Weinstein celebrates her familys example. Im a third-generation teacher. Informed opposition to injustice is as natural a part of her heritage as teaching. The most recent book by her 91-year-old grandmother, Selma James, is Our Time Is Now: Sex, Race, Class, and Caring for People and Planet.

Published last year, The Disordered Cosmos elliptically orbits the theme of Prescod-Weinsteins research in the context of her personal experience and intellectual coming of age. It ranges from the Alice-in-Wonderland contradictions of quantum mechanics to exploring how a dominant culture controls the naming of new concepts about nature and science to worrying about the dangers of an infamously colonialist culture carrying flags to the moon and Mars.

You know, Prescod-Weinstein says, you come to college in Boston, you go to a place like Harvard, and you hear about people like Maria Mitchell because theyre considered the great historical figures of the Boston-metro area. Its interesting which stories people choose to emphasize and choose to not emphasize. And that story about Mitchell refusing to segregate her school? That is not one I was told while I was in college. It wasnt considered worth remembering.

Author Rebecca Solnit wrote that stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell. The century and a half of womens struggles in science since Maria Mitchell has resulted in new constellations of astronomers gazing at the sky. With her work on comets and sunspots, as well as her unconventional teaching methods, Mitchell created a model for an alternate intellectual genealogy in the field of astronomy. Aware of the many women of color excluded from this genealogy, Prescod-Weinstein also divides her time between studying the sky and critiquing science and society. Like Mitchell, Prescod-Weinstein sees adding new observers as a way of changing science itself. Creating room for Black children to freely love particle physics and cosmology, she writes in her book, means radically changing society and the role of physicists within it.

Michael Sims is writing a book about the young Frederick Douglass. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to Maria Mitchells first students having a Caribbean background, when the historical record only supports a probable African heritage.

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She was a Quaker and self-taught astronomer with a radical idea: The stars belong to us all - The Boston Globe

The human eye is an amazing piece of equipment. It's so useful it likely evolved dozens of time independently as my friend Julia Sweeney says (paraphrased), "What good is half an eye? Probably about half as good as an eye." and allows us a way to sense the world and Universe around us with decent precision.

But... it's only sensitive to a very narrow range of light. It took a long time for humans to figure this out, but what we call visible light is only thin slice of the kind of light that's out there. Gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves... these are all forms of light with wavelengths too short or too long for the human eye to register.

If we only look to the heavens so see the visible light it sends us, we're missing out on well over 99.9% of what's out there.

Radio and millimeter waves are profoundly important things to be able to detect. So many objects emit them, from the Sun and planets to dust clouds forming stars and electrons whizzing around magnetic field lines around black holes and supernovae. By studying this form of light we get much more information about the Universe, and keen insight into the engines that drive it.

Every year there are incredible new discoveries made because astronomers and engineers built the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the immense Greenbank Radio Telescope, the Very Large Array, and more; huge dishes or multiple combined dishes to scan the sky and, well, see what we can see, even if we can't see them per se.

So it was my pleasure to work with my friends at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) to present some amazing long-wavelength astronomical highlights from 2021. We combed through the year's research, found eight wonderful stories, and I wrote and did the voice-over for beautiful animations that NRAO created to explain these phenomena. Fasten your seatbelts! We're going to travel from the nearest astronomical object in the Universe out to its most distant reaches.

Radio telescopes don't just receive long-wavelength light from objects; some can transmit it to bounce off nearby solar system bodies like the Moon. This technique, called synthetic aperture radar, can be used to map the Moon to an incredible resolution of just 5 meters. The initial tests have been so successful that NRAO received a multi-million dollar NSF grant to expand its efforts.

Our Milky Way galaxy is actively making stars, and many galaxies we see are fecund indeed. But others appear to have their star formation being quenched, where star birth is suppressed or even stagnant. To learn why, astronomers turned to ALMA to find out.

The nearby galaxy M87 has an enormous central supermassive black hole, famous for posing for the first ever high-resolution image of such a beast, which is blasting out a powerful beam of matter and energy that stretches for thousands of light years. Detailed observations using the Very Large Array show that along some its length the jet is actually a pair of entwined corkscrew spirals, a double helix much like DNA.

We see stars in the process of formation in nearby gas clouds with quite a bit of detail, but finding massive stars ones with many times the mass of the Sun in the throes of formation is more difficult. However, looking at the nebula W51, astronomers found three such monsters being created, helping them understand what's different for them than for more modest stars.

One of the more amazing recent advances in astronomy is being able to see planets forming around other stars in huge swirling disks of gas and dust. Elias-2-27 is nearby still-forming star where a massive planet is also collecting itself. ALMA observations show the chaos that such an event sows.

This is one of my favorites stories from 2021: A star went supernova in a galaxy 500 million light years from Earth. Routine, right? Yeah, well, they also found evidence that the reason this supernova occurred is because a black hole collided with the star, fell to the center, and made such a mess in the star's core that it exploded. Holy wow!

How do stars in our galaxy form? In a huge survey of the sky, astronomers used the Very Large Array to map hydrogen gas, as well as complex molecules like methanol and formaldehyde, and saw star factories churning them out, as well as the expanding debris from stars that exploded long ago.

In 2021, a type of active galaxy called a quasar was found so far away its light took over 13 billion years to reach us a distance record. At its heart is a huge black hole powering its energetic emission... which is actually a problem, since we're not sure how it could've grown to such a large size so quickly after the formation of the Universe itself.

Pretty cool, the things we can do when we open our eyes past what our eyes alone can see! And if you think these are nifty, then check out the lists we did for 2020 and for 2019.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Virginia working toward my degree, we would often walk up the street to the NRAO HQ to attend talks by local and visiting radio astronomers (and also to play volleyball, since they had a great court there). It was a lot of fun to listen to people talk about their observations using instruments totally different than what I used, and to hear about new discoveries as they happened. It is a huge honor and pleasure to be able to work with NRAO now to create these annual highlights. I hope you like them too.

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8 highlights of radio astronomy in 2021 - Syfy

7 February 2022 10:00 (UTC+04:00)

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By Ayya Lmahamad

A little bit more than a year has passed since the liberation of Azerbaijani territories from Armenian occupation. Large-scale rehabilitation and construction work is underway on these lands.

In one of hisinterviews, President Ilham Aliyev said that we will have to build, equip an area equal to the territory of a country that is not the smallest in the world - Lebanon.

Azerbaijan started to restore and rehabilitate its lands immediately after the end of hostilities.

In 2021, Azerbaijan allocated $1.5 billion for the reconstruction of liberated territories, followed by AZN 2.2 billion ($1.2 billion) in 2022. These funds will be used primarily to restore infrastructure (electricity, gas, water, communications, roads, education, health, and so on) as well as cultural and historical monuments.

Astronomical station in Karabakh

Within a short period of time, Azerbaijan reconstructed the major infrastructure facilities on its liberated lands. Among them are the construction and opening ofFuzuli International Airport, the smart city project, that is already under completion inZangilan region, the construction and rehabilitation of various substations, roads, etc.

Executive Director of the ShamakhiAstrophysical Observatory of the National Academy of Sciences Professor Nariman Ismayilov recently stated that a new astronomical station will be built in the countrys Karabakh region in the near future.

He noted that the management of the National Academy of Science supported the proposal to build a new astronomical station in the Karabakh region, install modern robotic telescopes, create a central space testing site on the territory of the observatory to study the Earth through satellite observations.

This work will be an important step in the transformation of the ShamakhiAstrophysical Observatory into an international scientific center to explore the near and far space.

Astronomy in Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan has contributed to the development of science in the world, particularly so in astronomy. The country has got a real astronomical heritage, thanks to the presence in the 13 century of the famous Maragha Observatory in South Azerbaijan (now northwestern Iran) established by Azerbaijani astronomer Nasiraddin Tusi.

The development of national astronomy in the last century can be described through three stages.

The first stage covers the period of 1927-1991 and includes such events as the first astronomical expeditions and the establishment of the ShamakhiAstrophysical Observatory.

The Observatory was established in 1960 on the basis of the Astrophysics Sector of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijani SSR and its Shamakhi Astronomical Station (Pirgulu). It is considered as one of the large scientific centers for favorable astroclimatic conditions, equipped with telescopes and scientific equipment.

The second stage covers the period of 1992-1997 and is characterized as a "stagnation period"in the history of national astronomy [due to the collapse of the former Soviet Union, national and political instabilities in the newly independent country in its transition period, Armenian intervention, etc].

A new stage began in the second half of 997 with repairing, renovation, and reorganization work in the observatory and in astronomical activity in general.

Currently, astronomical research in Azerbaijan is conducted mainly in the ShamakhiAstrophysical Observatory and partially in relevant departments of several universities in Baku and in other organizations. There are three main scientific trends at the observatory - the physics of stars and nebulae, investigation of solar system bodies, and solar physics.

Azerbaijan has almost all of the attributes required for astronomy. The main contribution comes from the ShamakhiAstrophysical Observatory, which has headquarters and two high-mountain astronomical stations with favorable geographical locations. There is also a good astro-climate. Another significant fact is the mandatory teaching of astronomy as a separate subject in all higher-secondary schools, lyceums, as well as the teaching of astronomy and the fundamentals of space science in many university departments.

Additionally, Azerbaijani astronomers are actively involved in the works of some international organizations aiming at enhancing the participation of youth in astronomical and space activities and education.

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Ayya Lmahamadis AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter:@AyyaLmahamad

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Azerbaijan to build astronomical station in liberated Karabakh - AzerNews