Category Archives: Astronomy

It's hard to grasp how big galaxies are.

If you pointed a flashlight at the Milky Way's core you'd have to wait nearly 26,000 years for the light the fastest thing in the Universe! to get there. And we're not even halfway out to the edge of the galaxy; the flat circular spiral-armed disk of the Milky Way is fully 120,000 light years across.

Galaxies are immense.

So when I say galaxy clusters are huge, believe me. They are millions of light years across, and can contain hundreds of galaxies like our own and thousands in total (including the smaller ones).

But where do clusters come from? We think they form huge, condensing out of truly vast clouds of gas that form along a dark matter scaffold in the Universe that can be hundreds of millions of light years long. As they form they're technically protoclusters. The member galaxies form along with them, some getting an early start and growing rapidly.

This was all fairly theoretical until recently, when astronomers started finding protoclusters (and even protosuperclusters, still-forming clusters of clusters) in the sky. The European Space Agency mission Planck, which observed the entire sky in long wavelengths of light, found a couple of thousand candidate galaxy protoclusters, incredibly. One such protocluster is called PHz G237.01+42.50, and astronomers just took a much closer look at it to see what it's doing.

It was discovered in Planck data; young galaxies that are rapidly making stars shine brightly at the wavelengths Planck saw. In a protocluster there will be lots of these kinds of galaxies close together in the sky, so the astronomers looked for clumps bright blobs in the Planck data, and found PHz G237.01+42.50. It's also in a part of the sky that was intensely observed as part of a project called the Cosmic Evolution Survey that used a fleet of different observatories to investigate galaxy behavior across the electromagnetic spectrum.

The protocluster PHz G237.01+42.50 has enough galaxies in it far enough along in their formation process to identify them and the astronomers were able to ID 31 in total. These all lie about 10.7 billion light years from Earth, so we see them as they were when the Universe was a bit less than three billion years old. In other words, young, and still forming.

The total mass they find for the system is daunting: enough to make about 500 trillion stars like the Sun! As crushing at that seems on a human scale, that's about typical for a decent-sized galaxy cluster.

It's not clear how many stars are currently being made in all the galaxies forming there, but it's something between 4,000 and 10,000 times the mass of the Sun every year. That's well over a thousand times the starbirth rate of the Milky Way, but again that's not too surprising. We're talking a lot of galaxies there, and in the early Universe galaxies cranked out stars at far higher rates than they tend to today.

Another thing they found is that there appear to be two subprotoclusters here, smaller forming clusters likely connected, one about 10.65 and the other about 10.7 billion light years from us. That's a difference of 50 million light years, give or take, which is close enough that they might be physically connected. The nearest extant cluster to the Milky Way is the Virgo Cluster, for example, which is roughly 50-60 million light years away from us, and we're considered to be more or less on the most distant suburbs of it.

Which brings up a point. The clusters that are relatively close to us are easier to study than distant ones, but we see them more or less as they are now, long after they formed. We can learn a lot about them, but it's hard to know if what we're seeing is due to how they formed, or things that happened after. The Virgo Cluster has the ridiculously beefy galaxy M87 in its center that's the one with the supermassive black hole we got images of in 2019. Did it grow huge first then fall to the center, or did it form there and then ate everything that fell into the cluster core?

It's also an active galaxy: Material like gas and dust from the galaxy are falling into its center and getting gobbled down by the black hole. But as it falls down it gets incredibly hot and shines so brightly it can actually be brighter than all the stars in the galaxy combined. We call those active galaxies. Do those tend to be closer to the cluster core, and if so do they become active later, or are they active because they're in the core?

With PHz G237.01+42.50 they find about 20% of the galaxies are active, and the core of the cluster has a higher percentage of active galaxies and ones with higher star-forming rates than the cluster overall. That's very interesting. It strongly implies that environmental conditions are important in galaxy growth and in making these galaxies what they are.

They also compared PHz G237.01+42.50 to other protoclusters at the same distance from us and found it to be fairly typical in many ways, including how rapidly stars are forming in its citizen galaxies and the masses of those galaxies. On the other hand, they also find that the protoclusters have different percentages of galaxies in them that are normal star-forming galaxies, ones that are starbursts (rapidly forming stars), and ones that are quenched (not forming stars much at all). Again this implies that environmental conditions in young clusters may dictate how galaxies grow and evolve.

You can think of stars as the building blocks of galaxies, but galaxies are the building blocks of the Universe. For all that there are still many mysteries about them to solve, including how they're born and how that's affected by where they're born. The more protoclusters we can find and examine, the better we may be able to unravel the tangled history of our own Milky Way, too.

A lesson of astronomy: Looking outward is looking inward. We examine the Universe to better understand ourselves. It's poetic, and it's a noble endeavor.

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Astronomers spot the construction site for a galactic supercity - SYFY WIRE

As the first woman in the role, Catherine Heymans wants to bring astronomy and science to the masses.

Earlier this year, astrophysicist Catherine Heymans became the first woman to be appointed astronomer royal for Scotland since the position was created almost 200 years ago.

She is the 11th person to hold the role after it became vacant in 2019 following the death of John Campbell Brown, who held the position since 1995.

However, while the title lasts a lifetime, Heymans doesnt plan on holding onto it for all that time.

I think this title gives me immense opportunity to go out there and tell people about astronomy and what we do, but at some point, Ill run out of energy.

She said while there can sometimes be an elitist idea of holding onto prestigious titles, shes more focused on using it to do the work she wants to do and then letting the title go to the next person.

There are so many big questions I want to answer [and] Ive got a big project that I want to do to get telescopes installed in all our outdoor centres. Once Ive got that done, then I will pass this very sparkly tiara onto someone else.

Originally, the position was linked to the royal observatories in the UK. Up until 1995, the astronomer royal for Scotland was the title of the director of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. Since then, it has become an honorary title which, in Heymans words, means she gets to decide what exactly the role is.

Its a really great opportunity to be able to share with everyone just how much astronomy were doing in Scotland, both professional astronomy and amateur astronomy, she said.

My local amateur astronomy group, their membership has grown by 30pc during lockdown.

Not only is Heymans the first woman in the role for Scotland, she is also the first woman to be appointed as astronomer royal in the whole of the UK.

Coming from an all girls school as a child, she had no idea about the stereotype that science wasnt for girls because she was taught by women and surrounded by other young girls.

However, when she got to university, she didnt have a single woman lecturer and there were only six women in a class of 60. It wasnt until I started my PhD that I actually met a female physicist, which is crazy.

Now, Heymans is a professor of astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh and said she has seen the gender balance improve, with between 25pc and 33pc women coming into science courses.

I dont see us ever getting to 50pc at the current rate that were going. Theres something that were doing wrong and theres no single answer. If there was a single answer, we would have fixed it by now. But I think part of the problem is its really culturally ingrained in us that science is for boffins and science is really difficult and that maybe its not a job for girls, she said.

For this reason, Heymans wants to use her astronomer royal title to show that science is for everyone, no matter who you are and that its also for girls.

She said even now, she sees the cultural assumptions people make about what a senior STEM professional might look like.

Having been invited to be in the audience for the Richard Osmans House of Games quiz show, contestants were asked to find someone in the audience who could answer an astronomy question.

They were told the astronomer royal for Scotland was in the audience. So they went around trying [to find] an old man with a white beard, young man, then an old woman with white hair, progress!

Eventually it did narrow down to me but it just showed that your standard idea of what is an astronomer? is an old man with a white beard.

Heymans said another common misconception about astronomy is that its a solitary job, with images of people on their own with a single telescope coming to mind.

I think people think that science is often working away on your own and its absolutely not at all, its all big teams now. Theres such big questions that you cant answer them on your own.

It was clear from speaking to Heymans that shes incredibly passionate about every aspect of her career, from bringing science to the wider public to encouraging young woman into STEM.

But nothing made her light up more than when she was talking about astronomy. I think astronomy is one of the easiest ways get people into science because its so immediate, you just go out at night and its up there, she said. [Things like] black holes, can really capture your imagination, this idea of this infinite mass consuming everything that comes close to it.

What I love about it is you can take these crazy, awesome things that are happening out in the universe and then use fundamental physics and maths to explain it.

In terms of what most excites her in particular, she said she loves watching the seeds from big questions she and others have been trying to answer for years, such as what dark matter is, start to blossom 20 years later with advances in technology and major international projects.

I love that whole chain of going from a big question to an idea of how to solve it, building the technology, the engineering to put the equipment together that you need to conduct that experiment, and then the massive data analysis that follows, she said.

One of the fun things I do is I question Einsteins theory of gravity itself. So one way you can explain whats going on out in the universe is that maybe Einsteins theory of gravity is wrong.

I havent proved him wrong yet, she said. But thats just a fun thing to do, to skip up the hill to the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh just thinking: Will we prove Einstein wrong today? Probably not.

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Meet the first woman appointed as astronomer royal for Scotland - Siliconrepublic.com

By Mike Cook

You can see the rings! a boy said Saturday night, Nov. 13, as he viewed the planet Saturn through a telescope set up on Plaza de Las Cruces by the Astronomical Society of Las Cruces (ASLC).

Society members conduct public telescope viewings in free monthly gatherings, either in Las Cruces or at Leasburg Dam State Park, said ASLC President Ed Montes, who retired to Las Cruces in 2013 and is a popular actor in local theater. Hes been stargazing most of his life, since first looking at a comet with his great-grandmother in Texas decades ago.

ASLC is celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2021, Montes said. It was founded by a group that included astronomer Clyde Tombaugh (1906-97), the discoverer of Pluto, and a beloved Las Cruces icon.

On Nov. 13, ASLC members had telescopes of various diameters set up to view Saturn, Jupiter, Venus and the moon. They invited anyone walking by on the plaza or walking or driving along Main Street to take a look.

Through a partnership with New Mexico State University and the State Parks Division of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, ASLC maintains a 16-inch telescope at its observatory at Leesburg Dam, less than a 30-minute drive north of Las Cruces. The telescope is on permanent loan from the NMSU Astronomy Department, which donated it to ASLC in 2007, Montes said.

Las Cruces and Leesburg Dam are about the same altitude, Montes said, but the state park has much less light pollution than the city.

As part of its partnership agreement, the society reaches out to include as many members of the public as possible in viewing stars, planets, the Milky Way, nebula, asteroids and other astrological phenomena.

The telescopes on Plaza de Las Cruces offered amazing views of the two gas giants, Jupiter (nearly 460 million miles from earth) and Saturn (almost a billion miles from Earth), as well as much closer neighbors Venus (a little more than 50 million miles away) and Earths own moon (almost 239,000 miles from earth). Photos through telescopes were even possible.

Public viewings

ASLC has monthly public viewings, which begin about sunset.

The dates of viewings in Las Cruces are Saturdays, Dec. 11, 2021; and in 2022: Jan. 8, Feb. 12, March 12 and April 9; and at Leesburg Dam State Park, Saturdays, Nov. 27, 2021; and in 2022: Jan. 29, Feb. 26, March 26 and April 23.

You can also request a star party.

Visit https://aslc-nm.org/ for more information and for the locations of and directions to upcoming viewings. The website also shows the current months sky map and some very interesting science, including an astronomical glossary.

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Local astronomical society celebrating 70 years of bringing the universe to star gazers - Las Cruces Bulletin

Professor Marius Ionescu; Department of Mathematics, United States Naval Academy

Given a locally compact groupoid G and a locally compactabelian group bundle p_A G^(0), an extension of A is a locally compact groupoid such that ^(0)= G^(0)together with maps i :A and p : G such that i is a homeomorphism onto its range, p is continuous and open, i and p restricted toG^(0) are the identity. Following earlier work by Kumjian and Tu, we prove that the collection of proper isomorphism classes of compatible extensions form an abelian group. We present in detail the pushout constructions of extensions of groupoids following previous work by Kumjian. We describe how the T-groupoid of an extension is a particular example of the pushout construction. For the main examples, we specialize to extensions by 2 cocycles and prove that the pushout of such an extension is an extension by a cocycle as well. In particular, we desctib e the pushout of an extension by a normalized ech cocycle with values in a locally compact abelian group. This presentation is based on work with Alex Kumjian, Jean Renault, Aidan Sims, and Dana Williams

Operator Theory309 Van 1:30deparMeeting ID: 929 0186 1177

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Operator Theory - Marius Ionescu | Physics and Astronomy | The University of Iowa - Iowa Now

When Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell stumbled on something new during her PhD studies at Cambridge University, she was about to make what the Royal Society called one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 20th century.

The strange bit of scruff she noticed in the data coming from the radio telescope she helped construct in a field outside Cambridge in 1967 while studying interplanetary scintillation of compact radio sources, was a radio pulsar.

Pulsars are small pulsating radio stars, which are only about 10 miles across, and very dense because theyre formed when stars catastrophically explode, she explains. Their beam can be likened to that of a lighthouse beam, and when it shines on a radio telescope, it can pick up a pulse. The discovery made her a star, despite missing out on a Nobel prize.

Born in Lurgan, Co Armagh, Bell was interested in science after reading an astronomy book her father had taken out of the library. Growing up in a Quaker household, she was raised to believe she had as much right to an education as anyone else and decided to pursue science early on, even though very few girls did so at the time.

Bell moved to York in the UK to attend a Quaker boarding school at the age of 13, where she took science subjects. After graduation, she attended the University of Glasgow, gaining a degree in physics in 1965 before getting accepted to Cambridge Universitys New Hall to study quasars.

A luminous active galactic nucleus, quasars are powered by supermassive black holes, with mass ranging from millions to tens of billions times the mass of the sun. Bell was responsible for operating the telescope she helped build, and analysing its data. This was before computers, so there was over 30 meters of paper to be looked at by hand every day.

After completing her PhD, Bell got married and left Cambridge to raise her son and travel with her then husband around the UK, where his career took him.

She held a junior teaching fellowship at the University of Southampton, where she developed and calibrated a 1-10 million electron volt gamma ray telescope, before taking a research position teaching x-ray astronomy at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in London.

In 1974, the discovery of radio pulsars earned her supervisor Anthony Hewish a Nobel Prize. For many, the omission appeared to be due to her gender, because at the time women were an anomaly in physics and astrophysics, but Bell attributed it to the fact that she was a PhD student at the time of the discovery in 1967 at the University of Cambridge.

There is a committee who decides who gets the Nobel prize. Until then, they had never considered astronomy as physics.

She says there were upsides to not winning the coveted award. Once you win a Nobel prize, you wont get any other prize, because others feel they wont match up, but if you dont, youll get lots of other prizes.

She received the Oppenheimer Prize for outstanding contributions to the theoretical natural sciences in 1978, the Beatrice M Tinsley Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1987, the Herschel Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 1989, while also winning the Michelson Medal and being knighted by the Queen in 2019.

Bell served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society between 2002 and 2004, and as president of the Institute of Physics from October 2008 to October 2010.

In 2018, she was awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and gave the entirety of the 2.3 million prize money to help female, minority and refugee students seeking to become physics researchers. The scheme, administered by the Institute of Physics became known as the Bell Burnell Graduate Scholarship fund.

In 2021, she was awarded the Copley Medal, only the second female to ever win it after Dorothy Hodgkin won it in 1976. Interestingly, she was a Quaker too, she says. She is currently a visiting professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford where she studies neutron stars, and a fellow of Mansfield College.

About her Irish roots, Bell says; Im an honorary member of the Royal Dublin Society and come over for vacations. My family are from Dublin, and I really enjoyed visiting Ireland this past summer. A glorious day in Howth Head was a highlight.

When asked about the final frontier of space knowledge earth-like planets, Bell says there is progress. We are finding a lot of planets around stars, and are trying to see if they support life, she says.

Currently residing in Oxford, where she is still lectures, she says the universe still throws out more questions than answers. The pulsars she discovered in 1967, are used as proposed signposts for interstellar navigation and a map, which could direct aliens towards earth. Perhaps, in the decades to come, they could not just help scientists detect gravitational waves, but also communicate with alien lifeforms.

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The Armagh woman who made one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of 20th century - The Irish Times

Using NASAs Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESAs XMM-Newton satellite, astronomers have investigated unusual X-ray activity in three white dwarfs: KPD 0005+5106, PG 1159-035 and WD 0121-756.

This artists illustration depicts what Chu et al. think is happening in the binary system KPD 0005+5106. The data suggest the white dwarf (blue sphere) is blasting a companion object (brown and red object on right), which is either a low-mass star or planet, with waves of heat and radiation. The white dwarf is also pulling material from the companion into a disk around itself, which the artist shows in orange, before it slams into its north and south poles. This process is contributing to the destruction of the companion through powerful gravitational forces. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss / ASIAA / Chu et al.

Most stars, including the Sun, will become white dwarfs after they begin to run out of fuel, expand and cool into a red giant, and then lose their outer layers. This evolution leaves behind a stellar nub that slowly fades for billions of years.

Typically, white dwarfs give off low-energy X-rays. However, KPD 0005+5106, PG 1159-035 and WD 0121-756 also had surprisingly bright X-ray emission at higher energies.

KPD 0005+5106 stood out among this group. It had high-energy X-ray emission that was regularly increasing and decreasing in brightness every 4.7 hours.

This recurring ebb and flow of X-rays indicates that KPD 0005+5106 has an object in orbit around it either a very low-mass star or a Jupiter-like planet.

Material from the low-mass star or planet could be slamming into the north and south poles of the white dwarf, creating a bright spot of high-energy X-ray emission.

As the white dwarf and its companion orbit around each other this hot spot would go in and out of view, causing the high-energy X-rays to regularly increase and decrease.

We didnt know this white dwarf had a companion before we saw the X-ray data, said Dr. You-Hua Chu, an astronomer in the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sinica.

Weve looked for the companion with optical light telescopes but havent seen anything, which means it is a very dim star, a brown dwarf, or a planet.

KPD 0005+5106 is located about 1,300 light-years in the constellation of Cassiopeia.

It is one of the hottest known white dwarf stars, with a surface temperature of about 200,000 K.

The companion object is almost 805,000 km (500,000 miles) away from the white dwarf, only about one thirtieth of the distance from Mercury to the Sun. Whatever this object is, its getting blasted with heat, said Dr. Jess Toala, an astronomer at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

The astronomers looked at what would happen if this object was a Jupiter-mass planet a possibility that agrees with the data more readily than a dim star or a brown dwarf.

In their models, the white dwarf would pull material from the planet onto the white dwarf, a process that the planet could only survive for a few hundred million years before eventually being destroyed.

This stolen material swirls around the white dwarf, which glows in X-rays that Chandra can detect.

This is a slow demise for this object thats basically being ripped apart by constant gravitational forces. It would be a very unpleasant place to be, said Dr. Martn A. Guerrero, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia.

The two other white dwarfs PG 1159-035 and WD 0121-756 were also thought to be solitary objects, but they show similar energetic X-ray emission to KPD 0005+5106. By analogy, this suggests they may also have faint companions, possibly planets.

The hard X-ray emission from apparently single white dwarfs is powered by accretion from sub-stellar companions or giant planets, and is modulated by the orbital motion with a period of 4.7 hr, the authors concluded.

The results appear in the Astrophysical Journal.

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You-Hua Chu et al. 2021. Hard X-Ray Emission Associated with White Dwarfs. IV. Signs of Accretion from Substellar Companions. ApJ 910, 119; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/abe5a5

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Hard X-Ray Emission from White Dwarfs Reveals Their Hidden Companions - Sci-News.com

An expert in astronomy has given his top tip of what to do if an asteroid is found to be heading towards Earth.

Professor Alan Duffy, director of the Space Technology and Industry Institute Professor has said that if a giant boulder of space rock is hurtling our way, "don't look at it".

Duffy gave the obvious-sounding advice to the I've Got News For You podcast.

He said: "I would say the best advice is, for goodness sake, do not look at this thing.

"I mean, its going to be hard not to the brightness of the glare from these objects burning up in the atmosphere.

"Thats actually what caused a lot of the injuries in Chelyabinsk (a meteor strike in Russia in 2013), people not unreasonably looked up at this enormous burning fireball in the sky, whose brightness was essentially that of the Sun by the time it finally erupted, that caused a lot of retina damage so make sure youre not looking right at it."

The light caused by the Chelyabinsk strike was brighter than the sun and was visible up to around 100km away from the area.

This "don't look" warning comes a few days after NASA fired a rocket at an asteroid in an attempt to find out whether it's possible to force such a large object hurtling through space to change course in an attempt to form some sort of plan to protect Earth.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission launched from a SpaceX explosive-packed rocket yesterday, with the missile expected to hit Dimorphos in September 2022.

Professor Duffy, however, did say that an asteroid impacting upon earth is "definitely not our biggest problem," and that Dimorphos, which is around 160 metres across, is known only as a "city killer".

He added: "Those things are going to hit the earth about once every 1000 or 2000 years, so its not a super rare event by geological standards but is maybe not something were going to be worrying about tomorrow."

To stay up to date with all the latest breaking news, just in case an asteroid is found to be hurtling towards us, make sure you sign up to one of our newsletters here.

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Astronomer explains one thing you should avoid if an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth - Daily Star

SHANGHAI When the telescope at eastern Chinas Purple Mountain observatory captured a snippet of a hitherto unknown asteroid in 1978, the astronomers named it after Ye Shuhua in honor of her contributions to Chinas modern astronomy advancements.

Her career in astronomy began in 1951, when Ye, then in her early 20s, joined the Shanghai Astronomy Observatory. It was just two years after the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, and Ye had just succeeded with a small revolution of her own by becoming the institutes first female researcher.

During her first decade at the observatory, she worked on measuring time using the positions of stars relative to Earth. In the early 70s, the government decided to move Chinas time service to the Shaanxi observatory in central China for its better broadcast reach and better protection from a potential enemy invasion. Ye had to brainstorm what the Shanghai observatory should work on next.

Thats when she decided to build Chinas very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI), a network of telescopes that work together to track celestial objects and spacecraft. Because a VLBI performs best when the telescopes are far apart, Ye was determined to build three: one on the eastern coast in Shanghai, one in northwestern Chinas Xinjiang region, and one in Yunnan, in the countrys southwest.

There were enormous challenges to overcome, both technologically and financially. At the time, the most technologically advanced countries had just begun experimenting with VLBI networks. Yes proposal met strong headwinds. But she didnt budge.

Now, decades later, the four-telescope-strong network an additional one was built in Beijing is foundational to Chinas ambitious space exploration program.

Ye became the head of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in 1993, becoming the first female leader at a Chinese observatory and there havent been many since. She was also the vice-president of the International Astronomical Union, a non-government organization of astronomers, between 1988 and 1994.

Earlier this month, while Ye Shuhua, the 17-kilometer-wide space rock, was hurtling along its orbit around the sun somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, Ye Shuhua, the considerably smaller human, gave a speech at the 4th World Laureates Forum in Shanghai.

If you want to get something, you have to fight for it, Ye, standing on the podium in a crimson red coat, told the audience in fluent English.

Speaking with Sixth Tone during the forum, Ye discussed her work at the Shanghai Astronomy Observatory, womens role in astronomy, and the outlook of the Chinese space program. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Visitors stand in front of a digital recreation of the sun at the newly opened Shanghai Planetarium, July 30, 2021. Hector Retamal/AFP

Sixth Tone: Youve devoted your life to astronomy. What attracted you to this field?

Ye Shuhua: I like it because astronomy doesnt involve competing with people or with the world the universe is the only thing in your eyes. The most important thing we do is to help people understand the secrets of the universe better. Besides, astronomy actually has many practical applications, such as our Beidou satellite navigation system and time measurement.

Sixth Tone: Having witnessed the evolution of Chinese astronomy for 70 years, which developments instilled you with the most optimism?

Ye: I think now, like the last 10 years or so, is the best era for astronomy in China. There is a lot of big equipment being built. Look at FAST, our 500-meter telescope, which is the envy of international peers. I'm not saying it's the greatest thing in the world, but it's very distinctive.

The first giant radio telescope was built in the United States (territory Puerto Rico), but at that time, some 50 years ago, there were still many technical challenges even the U.S. couldnt overcome. With technology advancements in recent years, Nan Rendong, whos a really good friend of mine, decided to lead the project of building a giant telescope in China. He and his team put in a lot of effort to improve the design of FAST and made it really efficient.

Sixth Tone: Have you been to FAST? What was your impression?

Ye: Yes I have been there. I just think its too spectacular so it has attracted too much of an audience. People from China and abroad come to check it out. Of course we welcome them, but the more people, the larger the impact on observation work. For astronomical observations, we dont want to have a lot of people around.

But as time passes, maybe people will gradually get tired of it and lose interest, and not so many people will come.

Sixth Tone: Was building Chinas VLBI network a difficult process?

Ye: When the Peoples Republic was just founded, the country still faced all kinds of difficulties. At that time, time keeping and broadcasting were the most urgent tasks. So my colleagues and I put a lot of effort into it. But later, the government realized that placing time work in Shanghai would be dangerous if a war ever broke out on the eastern coast of the country, the time service could be easily knocked out. Also, its difficult to broadcast time to the western part of China, so they decided to move the time service to the central province of Shaanxi.

But in this way, the Shanghai station lost what it does for a living. So we had to find something else. I looked around and thought the most promising work is VLBI. At that time, this technology just appeared in the U.S., and even in the U.S. the project was struggling to gain approval because its expensive and difficult. But I was very ambitious and not afraid of anything at the time, and I was convinced that it was the best thing to work on.

I proposed that we should build three stations in China, but there was only enough money for two stations. Building the Shanghai and Yunnan stations was the easy option, but I decided to work on the hardest, which is the one in Urumqi, in Xinjiang. At the time the city had a tiny observatory with very few staff and barely any equipment.

But I thought that if I didnt insist on setting up the Urumqi station, no one would care about this observatory and no one would want to put in the hard work. VLBI works better when the stations are far apart, so I was very stouthearted. People say do the easy task first and then work on the difficult. But I did the reverse. If you dont seize the opportunity, it may be gone forever.

With VLBI, my colleagues at the Shanghai observatory help determine what to do when a spacecraft needs to change orbit in space. The calculations are very accurate and impressively fast. Im very proud.

A display shows a mockup of the Earth at the Shanghai Planetarium, July 30, 2021. Hector Retamal/AFP

Sixth Tone: Shanghai has recently built the worlds largest planetarium. Have you been there?

Ye: I have. I think this planetarium is certainly very beautiful. But there is still a lot of room for improvement.

I hope that the planetarium can be more accessible and enjoyable to all kinds of people, so that even senior citizens can visit and learn about the universe. Many elderly peoples views are constrained by religiosity, so if they can understand the universe, maybe it will help them a little. If the planetarium is full of very sophisticated stuff, the general public might not learn much during a visit. What I hope for is a planetarium that serves the whole society.

Sixth Tone: What is one of the unsolved mysteries of the universe that you would like to know the most?

Ye: Ah there are so many. Black holes, for example. Everyone wants to know more, right? But personally I think projects that are directly related to practical use are the foremost important thing that we have to do well. For example, we want to go explore the moon. But if we dont devote efforts in the VLBI, we cant guarantee a successful landing every time.

Sixth Tone: In the last decade or so, China has built many sophisticated and large instruments, like FAST. But is the progress of Chinas theoretical astronomy developing as fast as the hardware?

Ye: Previously, there was a significant lack of resources in astronomy. And because for practical fields like telescopes and satellite navigation, we have to make sure the data are 100% correct, we allocated a lot of humanpower. But it does not mean that no attention was paid to theoretical astronomy research. For example, our current head of the Shanghai Observatory is very much into black hole research. Now that the number of people in astronomy is increasing, and astronomical research is getting more support, there will be a more balanced development in the future. I even expect China to lean toward theoretical astronomy research.

Ye Shuhua gives a speech at an opening ceremony for the Shanghai Science & Technology Museums astronomical research center, Shanghai, Dec. 18, 2020. Wang Rongjiang/People Visual

Sixth Tone: Youre the first female director at any Chinese observatory, and there are still very few females in leadership roles in Chinas astronomy field. Did you have to break the glass ceiling?

Ye: After I graduated from university, I came back to the Chinese mainland after working as a teacher for two years in Hong Kong. I went to the Purple Mountain Observatory to look for a job, and they told me they only had a vacancy for a man. I was stunned when I heard that. That was in 1951. So I wrote a letter to the director of the Observatory, where I listed five reasons why he was wrong to not hire me.

When I was young, I wasnt afraid of anything. And the letter did get me a job at the Shanghai station.

Sixth Tone: Astronomy is still heavily dominated by males. How can we encourage more women into the field?

Ye: In astronomy, there are now more and more female scientists. But the proportion is still small. Women are still burdened with more duties than men in and outside the family, like caring for children and the elderly. This situation is not unique to China women around the world face it.

I feel a bit guilty about my own family, because I spent most of my time at work and had to constantly go on business trips. But its the nature of my job, so theres nothing more to say. I hope that, in the future, if there are better arrangements for childcare and family responsibilities, women will definitely get a better working environment. Im afraid its not so easy to change it can only be done gradually.

Contributions: Xu Jialu; editor: Kevin Schoenmakers.

(Header image: Ye Shuhua is pictured during the 4th World Laureates Forum in Shanghai, Nov. 1, 2021. People Visual)

Continued here:

Through the Glass Ceiling, and Beyond - Sixth Tone

A smattering of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter have been named after Ottawa-area astronomers.

On Nov. 8, the International Astronomical Union's naming working group for small bodies released the new names of 40 asteroids something it does about once a month.

In this bunch Ottawa-area astronomer Roger Hill recognized all the names, including his own. A handful of asteroids were named after amateur Ontario astronomers who'd worked with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.

Those included Kim Hay,president of the Kingston, Ont., centre of the society, Hill, who was on the board of the Hamilton, Ont., centre for decades, and Brian McCullough whoseasteroid was named in October's list volunteered with the Ottawa centre.

Hill was nominated more than three years ago by his fellow astronomers in Hamilton for his work on the board, editing the society's newsletter and in public outreach.

"I'd check maybe once a year just to see if my name had been added to the list. But alas, I was not immediately after Roger Federer, who has one as well. So, I gave up looking," he said.

That changed last week and Hill said he was "over the moon about it."

"This is a lifelong dream to have a piece of the solar system named after me. It's not something I ever expected and I'm incredibly grateful," he said. "It's really nice to be recognized, particularly by one's peers."

Hill got his first telescope when he was 10 years old. Kids, he says, are fascinated by the big numbers of space and he felt compelled to share the feeling that staring at the stars can put "body and soul back together again."

All in a Day9:12Asteroid named after Kanata astronomy educator

When Hill negotiated where to move during retirement, his only request to his wife: dark skies. The two settled in Cardinal, Ont., about an hour south of Ottawa.

From this location, he expects it will be about six months before his asteroid is hopefully visible.

The asteroid is six kilometres in diameter and takes just over four years to orbit the sun. It's 300,000 times fainter than the eye can see, so not particularly bright.

Even with his observatory and a telescope with a mirror 30 centimetres in diameter, he doesn't think he'll be able to see it, but he's hoping a long exposure picture taken with the aid of the telescope will be able to capture it.

Unlike Hill, McCullough wasn't aware the Ottawa centre had nominated him and hearing about the asteroid called (10059) McCullough = 1988 FS2was a complete surprise.

He first became enamoured with astronomy as a navigator with the Royal Canadian Navy in the 1970s.

"I was so thrilled and so enthusiastic to learn more all the time. I couldn't contain myself and I had to share it with others," he said.

He's spent many years bringing out his telescope for community groups and Girl Guides and looksforward to returning to it oncepandemic measures allow.

McCullough says the recognition for his service makes him emotional, even more important than having his name "hanging on an asteroid."

His daughter is an astrophysicist and was able to look up the particulars of his asteroid. He told CBC Radio's All In A Day she was able to find out the asteroid was one of four picked at random from 1,700 possibilities.

"The reason they chose this one is because it doesn't vary in its brightness, very much, so they can use it kind of like a standard hanging in the asteroid belt to compare comets against," McCullough said.

It's very dim, according to McCullough, only reflecting 20 per cent of the sunlight that hits it, comparable to Pluto, which he says he's been able to see with his telescope.

"This would be right on the edge of observation/imagination [with a backyard instrument], you could just barely see it."

His asteroid is one of just under 23,000 that have been named in the asteroid belt, of which there are more than a million with a diameter of more than one kilometre.

Go here to read the rest:

'Over the moon': Eastern Ontario astronomers recognized with asteroid names - CBC.ca

The IDL Astronomy Users Library is a central repository for low-level astronomy software written in the commercial language IDL. The Library is not meant to be an integrated package, but rather is a collection of procedures from which users can pick and choose (and possibly modify) for their own use. Submitted procedures are given a cursory testing, but are basically stored in the Library as submitted. Instrument-specific software is generally not included in the IDL Astronomy Library, but can be found at the Links to Other Astronomy and IDL related sites.

The entire contents of the Library can be downloaded in a tar file or in a .zip file from the the download site . Additional software, not included in the tar files, is available in a contrib directory. Individual procedures can be copied by browsing through a list of one-line descriptions. Changes to the contents of the Library are recorded in a news file. A versioned copy of the library isavailable on GitHub, and one can also be download the Library with the command git clone git://github.com/wlandsman/IDLAstro.git

Some routines in the IDL Astronomy Library make use of programs in theCoyote Graphics Library, which must be downloaded separately. Alternatively, one can download coyote_astron.tar.gz which contains a subset of the Coyote procedures needed for the Astronomy library. We also suggest downloading the MPFIT curvefitting routines developed by Craig Markwardt, although it is currently onlyused by one Astronomy Library routine (SOLVE_ASTRO ) .

Documentation is available describing the various options for working with FITS data in IDL.

The IDL Astronomy Library requires at least IDL V6.4. However, separate (frozen) versions of the Library that work with earlier versions of IDL are available at the /old download site.

The success of the IDL Astronomy User's Library depends on the willingness of users to give as well as take. Please inform Wayne Landsman of any possible contributions to the Library, programming bugs or documentation errors, or of relevant web sites.

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The IDL Astronomy User's Library