Category Archives: Astronomy

Astronomers spy rocky and icy wanderers of all shapes and sizes zipping past Earth all the time. But earlier this month, they were flabbergasted when they caught sight of the largest comet theyd ever seen.

One of its discoverers, Pedro Bernardinelli, an astrophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania, conservatively estimates the objects dusty, icy nucleus is between 62 and 125 miles long. That means this comet is as small as five Manhattan Islands, or its larger than the Island of Hawaii. Hale-Bopp, which lit up night skies in the late 1990s with its 25-mile-long nucleus, was long perceived to be a giant among comets. But the nucleus of this comet, Comet C/2014 UN271, is still two or three Hale-Bopps across, said Teddy Kareta, a planetary astronomy graduate student at the University of Arizona. Its just wild.

With a reasonable degree of certainty, its the biggest comet that weve ever seen, said Colin Snodgrass, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh.

The comet is currently inside Neptunes orbit. Over the next decade, it will scoot toward the inner solar system. More of its ices will be vaporized by the suns glare, causing it to effervesce and brighten. In 2031, it will get within a billion miles of the sun almost but not quite making it to Saturn before journeying back to the coldest, darkest fringes of our galactic neighborhood.

Although its unlikely a spacecraft will be able to rendezvous with the comet, spotting it while its still two billion miles away means that astronomers can train their telescopes on it and watch it flare, then fade, in staggering detail over the next 20 years.

Comets are like cats. You never know what theyre going to do, said Meg Schwamb, an astronomer at Queens University Belfast. Im ready to get the popcorn.

Comets are icy remnants as old as the sun, and may have delivered both water and organic matter to the solar systems rocky worlds. This frosty leviathan, then, is a fantastic opportunity to uncover a bounty of cometary secrets.

It was first spotted with the Dark Energy Survey, an effort to map distant galaxies and exploding stars in order to investigate the universes accelerating expansion. To galaxy hunters, all those rocks in the foreground are just a nuisance, Dr. Snodgrass said. But to comet chasers, theyre quite an interesting nuisance.

A search of the surveys databanks found over 800 novel iceballs with orbits larger than Neptunes. One, designated 2014 UN271, was by far the most interesting one we found, Dr. Bernardinelli said.

A series of images of the icy object captured from 2014 to 2018 revealed it was definitely icy, probably elongated, and had emerged from the Oort cloud, an expansive shell of primordial space debris surrounding the solar system nothing unusual so far. But when its dramatic dimensions were announced on June 19, scientists were blown away. Its not even close to being the largest object beyond Neptune. But its sunward trajectory meant that, if its ices transmogrified into gases, it would become the largest comet ever found.

Their curiosities piqued, Dr. Snodgrass, Dr. Schwamb and their colleagues used telescopes in South Africa and Namibia to take a closer look and they spied a coma, an envelope of gas, surrounding it. Despite its considerable distance, some of its more volatile ices carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, perhaps were already being vaporized by slivers of sunlight.

It was official: This was a colossal comet. On June 24, this newly identified gadabout was renamed Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) after its discoverers Dr. Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania.

This comet takes roughly three million years to make one complete circumnavigation of the sun. The last time it was here, modern humans had yet to evolve. The next time it comes around, who can say what will have come of our species. This may be the only chance humanity will get to glimpse it.

In 2031, if you take a halfway-decent telescope to a dimly lit area, you will be able to see this specter shift among the stars. At a distance of one billion miles, it wont provide the cinematic streak some comets are famous for, but you will see a flicker of light.

Many of the night skys flickers belong to unfathomably distant objects. But not comets and, like all its icy cousins, this one is both weird and beautiful, Mr. Kareta said. Its visitation reminds us that the universe isnt a static expanse, but a chaotic ballet, full of wondrous things always in motion.

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The Largest Comet Ever Found Is Making Its Move Into a Sky Near You - The New York Times

Institute for Astronomy

Naming asteroids is serious business. In the latest batch of officially named asteroids, five have been given names honoring astronomers at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA).

The International Astronomical Union Committee for Small Body Nomenclature is responsible for designating and naming minor planets. If an object has been observed for at least two nights and is proven to be a newly-identified object, it is assigned an initial provisional designation. If enough observations are obtained to calculate an orbit, the object is assigned a sequential numerical designation. The asteroids discoverer can then propose a formal name.

Newly designated asteroids

These five new designations join a cornucopia of at least 40 asteroids named after current and former IfA astronomers, students, staff and other individuals.

For a full list, please go to the IfA website.

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Asteroids named after UH astronomers | University of Hawaii System News - UH System Current News

Aryan Mishra, 21, son of a newspaper seller, made headlines when he discovered an asteroid at the age of 14.

He was set to build astronomy labs in government schools in 2019 after being approached by the Central government. The idea hasnt taken off yet and he and his colleagues Shishirant Rahul, Shakeel Ahmad, and Naveen Sharma have been able to set up only 15 labs across the country, including in only three government schools in Jammu, Leh and Kargil.

The governments idea was to set up 500 astronomy labs across the country. I dont know why the idea hasnt taken off yet. Delhi government schools have done well over the last few years. I hope we can take the idea forward. Unfortunately, I havent been able to meet Delhi Deputy Chief Minster Manish Sisodia. I have tried many times though, Mr. Mishra, now a third-year BSc student of a private university said. He is studying on scholarship.

The idea of astronomy lab a start-up called Spark Astronomy was conceived in 2018 when Mr. Mishra had just graduated from Class 12 and had got into several universities in the U.S. but had to cancel his plans because he couldnt arrange the funds.

Honestly, I thought that with this start-up, Ill also be able to fund my education but unfortunately, that didnt happen. And the whole idea behind it was to make science accessible and easy for those who are interested, he said.

The lab which roughly costs 4.5 lakh and 20 days to fully set up has telescopes, planispheres, moon mapping catalogue among other articles.

Now, this group of four is working towards making low-cost telescopes so those who want to see the sky can see it freely. The feeling was invoked because of Mr. Mishras personal experience as a child and the hardships he had to face coming from a humble background.

He was born to Birbal Mishra and Shashi Mishra, both uneducated who had come to the city from their hometown in Uttar Pradesh, 32 years ago, in search of a better life. Mr. Mishra recalled how his father used to sell vegetables in the initial years when he came here and then worked as a watchman for 10 years while selling newspapers with his brother. Though he has quit the watchman job, he continues to deliver newspapers in Vasant Vihar and Shanti Niketan.

Mr. Mishra got into a charity school where his parents managed to pay the fees because they wanted their children Aryan and his sister to study because they couldnt.

While living in the slums at Kusumpur Pahadi, I got a clear view of the sky. There were no big buildings that blocked my view and I was a curious child who had so many questions about what goes on up there. I used to ask my teachers at school and finally joined the astronomy club, he said, adding that a cyber cafe in the vicinity helped him a lot.

I used to spend a lot of time there and thats also where I discovered the asteroid from. He never used to charge extra money from me for sitting there for extra hours.

Mr. Mishra managed to buy a telescope, while in school, by saving up money.

After the asteroid discovery, he got appreciation from different corners and was invited for talks but all the fame never really translated into anything tangible, he added.

I never received any monetary or other help from anyone to enable me to do anything. I have done everything on my own and with my familys help. I continue to stay in the slums. Only now I live in a pucca house and also have a personal phone, he said.

Some incidents of the past still hurt though, Mr. Mishra said recalling an episode from school time when he was helping his father with delivering newspapers. A few students travelling in the school bus had seen him and informed school authorities. They called my parents and told them that they shouldnt because I am a child. But sympathy wouldnt have fed my family.

Excerpt from:

500 astronomy labs yet to see light of day - The Hindu

Artists concept of a cosmic filament a strand in the cosmic web, containing galaxies and dark matter stretching from one galaxy cluster to another. Fantastically, astronomers now say these vast filaments spin in space. Image via AIP/ A. Khalatyan/ J. Fohlmeister.Filaments of the cosmic web

Astronomers at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, in collaboration with scientists in China and Estonia, said on June 14, 2021, that theyve discovered a rotation a spin on an enormous scale never seen before. They made the discovery by mapping the motion of galaxies in huge filaments or strands of whats called the cosmic web. They were looking at the universe on the grandest scale, in which there are great filaments made of galaxies, separated by giant voids. And they found that these long tendrils of galaxies and matter, forming the vast cosmic filaments of the cosmic web, rotate on the scale of hundreds of millions of light-years.

Its the largest rotation in the universe, these astronomers said.

You know how ice skaters spin faster as they pull in their arms? Scientists describe that faster spin as due to conservation of angular momentum. These astronomers said their results:

signify that angular momentum can be generated on unprecedented scales.

The study was published on June 14, 2021, in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy.

So the cosmic filaments are essentially galaxy-packed bridges. And you might ask, from where to where? Astronomers say that vast clusters of galaxies lie at the nodes, or connection points, of the cosmic web. A cosmic filament made of galaxies now known to be spinning spans the vast distant between clusters of galaxies.

Noam Libeskind at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, initiator of the project, said that galaxies:

move on helixes or corkscrew like orbits, circling around the middle of the filament while travelling along it. Such a spin has never been seen before on such enormous scales, and the implication is that there must be an as yet unknown physical mechanism responsible for torquing these objects.

He also described the filaments themselves as thin cylinders:

similar in dimension to pencils, hundreds of millions of light-years long, but just a few million light-years in diameter.

And he added:

These fantastic tendrils of matter rotate. On these scales, the galaxies within them are themselves just specks of dust.

As Noam Libeskind said above, the galaxies in the filaments funnel on corkscrew paths into the clusters at their ends. Thus, to us on Earth, the light of the funneling galaxies appears red-shifted when moving away from us, and blue-shifted when moving toward us. Astronomers can measure a shift like that.

These astronomers measured red and blue shifts using existing data in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which began collecting data in 2000. Peng Wang of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam explained:

By mapping the motion of galaxies in these huge cosmic superhighways using the Sloan Digital Sky survey a survey of hundreds of thousands of galaxies we found a remarkable property of these filaments: they spin.

In hindsight, its logical to think that the filaments would spin. After all, there must have been a period during which as the early universe expanded outward from the Big Bang, and as galaxies began to form the galaxies for some reason pulled themselves into these vast filaments, creating the cosmic web in the first place. And, as they did so, its easy to think of the filaments spinning up, like ice skaters pulling in their arms.

In fact, it was earlier work by theorist Mark Neyrinck that caused these astronomers to analyze the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data. Libeskind said:

Its fantastic to see this confirmation that intergalactic filaments rotate in the real universe, as well as in computer simulation.

The scientists still wonder, though, why do they spin? Or perhaps its better to ask the question as how. How is the angular momentum generated? What made the galaxies pull themselves together into filaments? Why does the universe appear as a cosmic web at all?

Bottom line: Astronomers have found the largest rotation in the universe by analyzing red and blue shifts in galaxies. The galaxies compose strands or filaments in the cosmic web. Those filaments are now believed to be spinning.

Source: Possible observational evidence for cosmic filament spin

Via Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam

Kelly Kizer Whitt has been a science writer specializing in astronomy for more than two decades. She began her career at Astronomy Magazine, and she has made regular contributions to AstronomyToday and the Sierra Club, among other outlets. Her childrens picture book, Solar System Forecast, was published in 2012. She has also written a young adult dystopian novel titled A Different Sky. When she is not reading or writing about astronomy and staring up at the stars, she enjoys traveling to the national parks, creating crossword puzzles, running, tennis, and paddleboarding. Kelly lives with her family in Wisconsin.

Deborah Byrd created the EarthSky radio series in 1991 and founded EarthSky.org in 1994. Today, she serves as Editor-in-Chief of this website. She has won a galaxy of awards from the broadcasting and science communities, including having an asteroid named 3505 Byrd in her honor. A science communicator and educator since 1976, Byrd believes in science as a force for good in the world and a vital tool for the 21st century. "Being an EarthSky editor is like hosting a big global party for cool nature-lovers," she says.

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Astronomers spot largest rotation in the universe - EarthSky

This article was originally published atThe Conversation.The publication contributed the article to Space.com'sExpert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Lisa Kewley, Director, ARC Centre for Excellence in All-Sky Astrophysics in 3D, Australian National University

It will take until at least 2080 before women make up just one-third of Australia's professional astronomers unless there is a significant boost to how we nurture female researchers' careers.

Over the past decade, astronomy has been rightly recognized as leading the push towards gender equity in the sciences. But my new modeling,published in Nature Astronomy, shows it is not working fast enough.

Related: 20 trailblazing women in astronomy and astrophysics

TheAustralian Academy of Science's decadal planfor astronomy in Australia proposes women should comprise one-third of the senior workforce by 2025.

It's a worthy, if modest, target. However, with new data from the academy's Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) program, I have modeled the effects of current hiring rates and practices and arrived at a depressing, if perhaps not surprising, conclusion. Without a change to the current mechanisms, it will take at least 60 years to reach that 30% level.

However, the modeling also suggests that the introduction of ambitious, affirmative hiring programs aimed at recruiting and retaining talented women astronomers could see the target reached in just over a decade and then growing to 50% in a quarter of a century.

Before looking at how that might be done, it's worth examining how the gender imbalance in physics arose in the first place. To put it bluntly: how did we get to a situation in which 40% of astronomy PhDs are awarded to women, yet they occupyfewer than 20% of senior positions?

On a broad level, the answer is simple: my analysis shows women depart astronomy at two to three times the rate of men. In Australia, from postdoc status to assistant professor level, 62% of women leave the field, compared with just 17% of men. Between assistant professor and full professor level, 47% of women leave; the male departure rate is about half that. Women's departure rates aresimilar in US astronomy.

Read more:'Death by a thousand cuts': women of color in science face a subtly hostile work environment

The next question is: why?

Many women leave out of sheer disillusionment. Women in physics and astronomy say their careers progress more slowly than those of male colleagues, and that the culture is not welcoming.

They receive fewer career resources and opportunities. Randomized double-blind trials and broad research studies in astronomy and across the sciences show implicit bias in astronomy, which means more men arepublished,cited,invited to speak at conferences, and giventelescopetime.

It's hard to build a solid research-based body of work when one's access to tools and recognition is disproportionately limited.

There is another factor that sometimes contributes to the loss of women astronomers: loyalty. In situations where a woman's male partner is offered a new job in another town or city, the woman more frequentlygives up her work to facilitate the move.

Encouraging universities or research institutes to help partners find suitable work nearby is thus one of the strategies I (and others) have suggested to help recruit women astrophysicists.

But the bigger task at hand requires institutions to identify, tackle and overcome inherent bias a legacy of a conservative academic tradition that,research shows, is weighted towards men.

A key mechanism to achieve this was introduced in 2014 by the Astronomical Society of Australia. It devised a voluntary rating and assessment system known as thePleiades Awards, which rewards institutions for taking concrete actions to advance the careers of women and close the gender gap.

Initiatives include longer-term postdoctoral positions with part-time options, support for returning to astronomy research after career breaks, increasing the fraction of permanent positions relative to fixed-term contracts, offering women-only permanent positions, recruitment of women directly to professorial levels, and mentoring of women for promotion to the highest levels.

Most if not all Australian organizations that employ astronomers have signed up to the Pleiades Awards, and are showing genuine commitment to change.

Seven years on, we would expect to have seen an increase in women recruited to, and retained in, senior positions.

And we are, but the effect is far from uniform. My own organization, the ARC Centre of Excellence in All-Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), is on track for a 50:50 women-to-men ratio working at senior levels by the end of this year.

TheUniversity of Sydney School of Physicshas made nine senior appointments over the past three years, seven of them women.

But these examples are outliers. At many institutions, inequitable hiring ratios and high departure rates persist despite a large pool of women astronomers at postdoc levels and the positive encouragement of the Pleiades Awards.

Using these results and my new workforce models, I have shown current targets of 33% or 50% of women at all levels are unattainable if the status quo remains.

I propose a raft of affirmative measures to increase the presence of women at all senior levels in Australian astronomy and keep them there.

These include creating multiple women-only roles, creating prestigious senior positions for women, and hiring into multiple positions for men and women to avoid perceptions of tokenism. Improved workplace flexibility is crucial to allowing female researchers to develop their careers while balancing other responsibilities.

Read more:Isaac Newton invented calculus in self-isolation during the Great Plague. He didn't have kids to look after

Australia is far from unique when it comes to dealing with gender disparities in astronomy. Broadly similar situations persist in China, the United States and Europe. AnApril 2019 paperoutlined similar discrimination experienced by women astronomers in Europe.

Australia, however, is well placed to play a leading role in correcting the imbalance. With the right action, it wouldn't take long to make our approach to gender equity as world-leading as our research.

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates and become part of the discussion on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

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Looking at the stars, or falling by the wayside? How astronomy is failing female scientists - Space.com

Tendrils of galaxies up to hundreds of millions of light-years long may be the largest spinning objects in the universe, a new study finds.

Celestial bodies often spin, from planets to stars to galaxies. However, giant clusters of galaxies often spin very slowly, if at all, and so many researchers thought that is where spinning might end on cosmic scales, study co-author Noam Libeskind, a cosmologist at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany, told Space.com.

But in the new research, Libeskind and his colleagues found that cosmic filaments, or gigantic tubes made of galaxies, apparently spin. "There are structures so vast that entire galaxies are just specks of dust," Libeskind said. "These huge filaments are much, much bigger than clusters."

Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!

Previous research suggested that after the universe was born in the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago, much of the gas that makes up most of the known matter of the cosmos collapsed to form colossal sheets. These sheets then broke apart to form the filaments of a vast cosmic web.

Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the scientists examined more than 17,000 filaments, analyzing the velocity at which the galaxies making up these giant tubes moved within each tendril. The researchers found that the way in which these galaxies moved suggested they were rotating around the central axis of each filament.

The fastest the researchers saw galaxies whirl around the hollow centers of these tendrils was about 223,700 mph (360,000 kph). The scientists noted they do not suggest that every single filament in the universe spins, but that spinning filaments do seem to exist.

The big question is, "Why do they spin?" Libeskind said. The Big Bang would not have endowed the universe with any primordial spin. As such, whatever caused these filaments to spin must have originated later in history as the structures formed, he said.

One possible explanation for this rotation is that as the powerful gravitational fields of these filaments pulled gas, dust and other material within them to collapse together, the resulting shearing forces might have spun up this material. Still, right now, "we're not really sure what can cause a torque on this scale," Libeskind said.

The scientists now seek to understand the origin of filament spin through computer simulations of how matter behaves on the largest cosmological sales. The researchers detailed their findings online June 14 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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Astronomers discover largest known spinning structures in the universe - Space.com

Education | Profiles | Science | UW News blog

June 15, 2021

UW astronomer Emily Levesque delivers her course Great Heroes and Discoveries of Astronomy as part of The Great Courses, a popular online learning platform.The Teaching Company

If you look on Emily Levesques website, youll notice that one punctuation mark is prominent: the exclamation point. Classifying massive stars with machine learning! reads one blog post. Gravitational waves from Thorne-Zytkow objects! reads another.

My default state is exclamation point, said Levesque, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Washington. When were talking about space and were talking about science, how could you not?

Now Levesque is bringing that enthusiasm to The Great Courses, an online learning platform offering classes to the general public on a range of topics, from playing guitar to decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics. Levesques course, Great Heroes and Discoveries of Astronomy, takes viewers on a tour of the biggest advancements in one of humanitys oldest sciences and the people behind them.

This course, which launched in February, came six months after Levesques popular science book on the history of observational astronomy, The Last Stargazers. The course consists of 24 lectures and covers the work of some scientists you may be familiar with, like Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan and Edwin Hubble, and others who might be new to you.

Those names include Henrietta Swann Leavitt. She was one of the Harvard computers, the team of women who processed astronomical data work made famous by the film Hidden Figures. Leavitts research on measuring the distances to stars laid the groundwork for Hubbles assertion that the universe is expanding. George Carruthers was an African American scientist who patented an ultraviolet camera and built the only telescope weve taken to the moon. Vera Rubin discovered dark matter; today an entire subfield of astrophysics is devoted to studying it. An enormous telescope in Chile is now named after her.

The course pokes at our idea of what a scientific hero is, Levesque said. Theres this stereotype that science is done by a white man alone in a room, coming up with an idea and then just spitting it out full formed into the universe.

This stereotype overlooks the collaborative nature of science, something Levesques course highlights. Breakthroughs can result from the efforts of a dozen scientists doing work that builds off each other over time, or from heroic efforts by teams of thousands. Levesque teaches a unit on the discovery of gravitational waves; the gravitational wave detector in Washington, part of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, took thousands of people to build and takes thousands to maintain.

Levesque also broadens the definition of heroism to include acts like improving access to astronomy, making it more inclusive and bringing science literacy to the public.

One lecture tells the story of Frank Kameny, an astronomer in the U.S. Army Map Service. Months after he was hired in 1957, Kameny was fired when he refused to answer questions about his sexual orientation. He filed a lawsuit against the federal government, the first alleging discrimination based on sexual orientation in a U.S. court. Although it was unsuccessful, Kameny went on to become a leader in the fight for LGBTQ rights.

Its a really important time right now to remember that science is done by people, said Levesque. I dont think understanding science and understanding the human nature behind the discoveries we make has ever been more important. The human side of scientists cant be separated from the science that they do.

The human side of scientists not only affects their work, but it also shapes narratives around science. Stories we tell about scientific heroes and discoveries are often what makes science memorable. If the stories about people are interesting, then learning about the science will follow.

Levesque remembers, as a teen, reading the book A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaiken, about the early space program. She loved learning about the astronauts and the people in mission control. She was already a space geek, but reading about the fun they were having, identifying with them and seeing the creative problem-solving behind the science enabled her to picture what it would be like to work in astronomy.

Stories have the power to inspire or when the narrative is skewed or told from a singular point of view they can send a message about who does or doesnt belong. Thats why expanding the definition of a scientific hero beyond the stereotype is so important.

Levesque says her colleagues are a broad mix of people. They are ultramarathoners. They play in bands. They have a broad range of interests but have one thing in common: a love for space. More women are entering the field, but the low number of scientists from underrepresented groups like the Black and Latino communities shows there is still a ways to go when it comes to making astronomy more inclusive.

But if a broader range of stories are told, then more people will be able to envision themselves doing the work. And that will result in better science.

Its always worth reminding people when you talk about scientific heroism that you need heaps of people to do this work, Levesque said. Unique contributions can come from having a different perspective on a problem or other areas of expertise that a scientist can draw on. You need all sorts of talents and skill sets and enthusiastic folks who want to make science a part of their lives thats the ingredient, thats the way to do science.

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UW astronomer redefines the scientific hero as part of The Great Courses - UW News

As an astronomer whose research focuses on the imaging of extrasolar planets many light years away, Joe Carson spends a lot of time looking at distant celestial bodies. But his research and the imaging tools he and his team have created are grounded much closer to home. In fact, Carson credits the talent and skill produced right here at the College of Charleston for the development of medical imaging instrumentation that is now being used to look at human bodies on Earth.

Thats because his startup, Pensievision which primarily employs CofC alumni and students applies technologies from NASAs space telescopes to produce high-resolution 3D images using novel medical imaging instrumentation. The work includes their invention of the worlds first portable 3D colposcope to assist in early-stage detection of pre-cancer cervical lesions.

Over the past five years, everything that Pensievision has done has been enabled by students and alumni, who are the engine of the technologys development. Because of their work, we have been able to create this innovative and important device for doctors to use in any medical setting where imaging is used, says the associate professor of astronomy. My current projects long-term goal is to prevent cervical cancer deaths in some of the most underserved communities in the world, including those lacking medical infrastructure or even electricity.

Joe Carson and his startup, Pensievision, have created the worlds first portable 3D colposcope.

And, this spring, Carson was awarded a $400,000 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to make this a reality. Through the NIH Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, Cancer Prevention, Diagnosis, and Treatment Technologies for Low-Resource Settings, the grant supports a 20-patient study of the 3D-imaging camera that Carson and his team created. The funding will allow Carson to travel to Kenya to meet with womens health leaders there and prepare for an intended follow-up patient study in sub-SaharanAfrica.

This grant will have far-reaching impacts and its all possible because of the CofC students and recent grads and all their hard work that has led up to this, says Carson. Theyve been creating new codes, designing and assembling devices, and applying software in novel ways.

The students and alumni even played a central role in creating the NIH grant application. And considering that the NIH review committee gave the proposal a perfect score they did a pretty great job!

A perfect score is unheard of Ive never seen one, Ive never heard of one, says Carson, explaining that usually a score of 40 indicates youve done really well, with 10 being perfect and 90 being poorest. When I saw the score of 10, I actually contacted the program administrator to see if there was an error. It just shows how innovative this technology is. Its a big jump from what we have now a huge paradigm shift. So, this shows that they see something really special and really valuable in this work.

As immense an impact that this technology might have across the world, Carson says its the impact that the work is having on the students and alumni that hes especially proud of.

It gives them experience with leadership and optical design lab testing, engineering, circuit boards and with FDA considerations, and that approval process, he says. Theyre not just learning the technology and the engineering, they get to learn about deploying these products. Theyre thinking about the consumer side of it: usability, scalability, aesthetics.

They also get to see the economics of it, Carson continues. They get to see how getting investor support is different than government support. They get to see how things all come together all the different angles, from design to diagnosis to make a difference in medical research from here to third world countries. These things are the future of medicine, so it puts them in an extremely strong position for imaging processing, artificial intelligence, data analyses and so on.

Junior astrophysics majorJenna Snead agrees that the independent research project she has done with Carson andPensievisionhas all sorts of applications including inthe astrophysics research that she plans to do after college.

While doing a medical imaging project seems way out in left field, astrophysics relies on a lot of the same imaging techniques, which will help me in any future astronomicalimaging projects, says Snead, who last semester won the School of Science and Mathematics Best of the Best Award, the Sigma Xi Best of the Best Award and the Department of Physics and Astronomy Best Poster Award for her research with Carson. Dr. Carson also often takes time to go into detail about how the concepts Im working with relate to my particular field, and to physics in general. Additionally, working with software and computer programming is indispensableto both grad school and any area of physics research, so getting familiar working with this projects code has been an amazing experience.

This summer Snead is working with circuits in an attempt to improve battery functionality and length of battery life, but her particular study of interest involves color analysis and how to best organize color channels to get the best image possible from the imaging wand.

This work is largely done on the software side. While this seems like a small project, it is important that we can get a clear image so that the future clinicians using it can diagnose as accurately as possible, she says. The coolest thing Ive learned inmy research so far is definitely how we actually process light and create images. Everything we perceive requires a different focal lengthwhich,when done manually (as we are doing with our 3D imaging),requires long lines of code. However, our brain does it automatically, every second of the day. Its just crazy when we think about how capable our brains are of processing the world around us.

Its these kindsof connections that make Carson so excited about what the College can inspire in its students and how valuable that is to the future workforce.

The College produces smart, creative, hardworking innovators. It provides a really good educational background and its graduates are bringing that education out into the world, he says. The students and graduates of the College really are the lifeline of Pensievision our number one resource.

In addition to producing a smart and skilled staff for Pensievision, the College has supported Pensievision through partnerships and grant applications, too.

Pensievision did not sprout up by itself it took a lot of support. And I cannot emphasize enough CofCs role in partnering to save lives and to create high paying jobs in the Lowcountry. Forming those partnerships has been invaluable, says Carson, adding that in recent years Pensievision has been among the top employers of students graduating from the Colleges Department of Physics and Astronomy. And as CofCs engineering program gets up and running in the next few years, I think that this partnership will continue to expand.

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Astronomy Professor Develops Innovative Medical Imaging Device - The College Today

Astronomers have performed photometric and spectroscopic observations of B2 1420+32, a blazar with a collection of changing-look features.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey archival image from March 2004 (left) and the image from the observation campaign of B2 1420+32 taken by Mishra et al. in January 2020 using ASAS-SN (right); the blazars brightness increased by a factor of 100. Image credit: SDSS / Mishra et al., doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/abf63d.

Blazars are powerful active galactic nuclei (AGN) with relativistic jets pointing toward the observer.

Their jets span distances on the million light-year scales and are known to impact the evolution of galaxies and galaxy clusters in which they reside via the radiation.

These features make blazars ideal environments in which to study the physics of jets and their role in galaxy evolution.

Blazars are a unique kind of AGN with very powerful jets, said lead author Hora Mishra, a Ph.D. student in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Oklahoma.

Jets are a radio mode of feedback and because of their scales, they penetrate the galaxy into their large-scale environment.

The origin of these jets and processes driving the radiation are not well-known. Thus, studying blazars allows us to understand these jets better and how they are connected to other components of the AGN, like the accretion disk.

These jets can heat up and displace gas in their environment affecting, for example, the star formation in the galaxy.

In the research, Mishra and her colleagues investigated the evolution of B2 1420+32, a blazar located 6.3 billion light-years away in the constellation of Botes.

At the end of 2017, this blazar exhibited a huge optical flare, a phenomenon captured by the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) telescope network.

We followed this up by observing the evolution of its spectrum and light curve over the next two years and also retrieved archival data available for this object, Mishra said.

The campaign, with data spanning over a decade, has yielded some most exciting results.

We see dramatic variability in the spectrum and multiple transformations between the two blazar sub-classes for the first time for a blazar, thus giving it the name changing-look blazar.

The astronomers concluded that this behavior is caused by the dramatic continuum flux changes, which confirm a long-proposed theory that separates blazars into two major categories.

In addition, we see several very large multiband flares in the optical and gamma-ray bands on different timescales and new spectral features, Mishra said.

Such extreme variability and the spectral features demand dedicated searches for more such blazars, which will allow us to utilize the dramatic spectral changes observed to reveal AGN/jet physics, including how dust particles around supermassive black holes are destructed by the tremendous radiation from the central engine and how energy from a relativistic jet is transferred into the dust clouds, providing a new channel linking the evolution of the supermassive black hole with its host galaxy.

We are very excited by the results of discovering a changing-look blazar that transforms itself not once, but three times, between its two sub-classes, from the dramatic changes in its continuum emission.

In addition, we see new spectral features and optical variability that is unprecedented. These results open the door to more such studies of highly variable blazars and their importance in understanding AGN physics.

It is really interesting to see the emergence of a forest of iron emission lines, suggesting that nearby dust particles were evaporated by the strong radiation from the jet and released free iron ions into the emitting clouds, a phenomenon predicted by theoretical models and confirmed in this blazar outburst, said Dr. Xinyu, also from the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Oklahoma.

The study was published in the Astrophysical Journal.

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Hora D. Mishra et al. 2021. The Changing-look Blazar B2 1420+32. ApJ 913, 146; doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/abf63d

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'Changing-Look' Blazar Spotted 6.3 Billion Light-Years Away | Astronomy - Sci-News.com

It was something not from the Earth, U.S. Navy Cmdr. David Fravor, commanding officer of a squadron of F/A-18 Hornet fighter planes, said in an interview with the Washington Post about the fast-moving, Tic Tac-shaped UFO he sighted during a 2004 training mission over the California coast. The object moved unlike any aircraft he was aware of and seemed to defy nearby radar operators efforts to track it.

Fravors account of the incident remained classified for 13 years until the Department of Defense announced the formation of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force in 2017 and charged it with the job of cataloging and analyzing sightings of strange aerial objects that could potentially represent a threat to U.S. national security.

Late in 2019, lawmakers asked the secretary of defense and director of national intelligence to submit a report on what the task force has learned about the objects we know as UFOs, and an unclassified version of that report is scheduled to be released later this month.

Government officials have already confirmed that the task force has found no evidence of alien spacecraft, but University of Virginia astronomer Kelsey Johnson, who is president-elect of the American Astronomical Society and also a former member of the National Science Foundations Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee, spoke with UVA Today about what the report might contain and what it might mean for those of us who are eager to catch a glimpse of extraterrestrial life.

Q. What do you think the governments report on UFO activity is most likely going to tell us?

A. I think the report is likely to confirm that there have been sightings of objects in the sky that are currently unexplained. The catch is that just because something is unidentified does not mean that it was extraterrestrial life visiting Earth. If you are really bad at identifying things, then anything in the sky could technically be a UFO.

Taking the step to infer that the object is extraterrestrial in origin requires evidence and in science we have a saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Finding evidence for extraterrestrial life would pretty much peg the meter on extraordinary.

That being said, regardless of the origin of objects in UFO sightings, I think these occurrences can be important to study and understand. Objects that have been observed by reliable witnesses and recorded to behave in unexplained ways absolutely merit legitimate scientific effort. Even if the explanation isnt aliens, we might gain new insight into a natural phenomenon or better understand threats to national security. I find it really unfortunate that so much stigma has become attached to this topic among both scientists and government officials. Yes, be skeptical and require evidence, but also be open-minded to explanations you cannot rule out.

This stigma has actually spun off a new term with less baggage: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, or UAP.

Q. What kinds of phenomena are most likely reported as UFOs or UAP?

A. This depends on who is doing the reporting! For the general public, one of the underlying issues is that many people simply dont spend a lot of time outside looking at the sky, so folks are not so familiar with objects that are totally normal. As a result, Venus, Mars and even the moon are frequently reported as UFOs. But there are also a number of less-common, but still 100% explainable, atmospheric phenomena that can appear pretty strange if you dont know about them everything from sun dogs caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere to really funky clouds. Lenticular clouds can do an especially great job mimicking Hollywood-style flying saucers.

Things get much harder to explain when there appear to be changes in motion that defy known modern technology. This is what has raised some eyebrows with the recent reports by the military. I am reminded of the god of the gaps fallacy, which is to say that just because we dont understand something doesnt mean the explanation is supernatural or alien.

Q. What might make some of these phenomena appear to be something other than what they are?

A. Human perception is fraught with issues and is extremely unreliable, and the need to be skeptical of personal accounts is amplified when something isnt reproducible. We are also incredibly bad at gauging distances. If we dont really know how far away something is, changes in motion are easily misinterpreted by our brains. For these reasons and others, it is essential to have actual data and measurements to test against different hypotheses.

Q. Are there good reasons for using federal or military funding for further research into these sightings?

A. I think it is always worthwhile to study things we dont understand. That is how we make progress toward understanding the universe we live in. Truly unexplained phenomena with associated data should not be sitting on a shelf these could reveal something very cool about the natural world or a novel technology that could be beneficial or threatening.

Q. How could science benefit from a renewed interest in extraterrestrial visitors?

A. Science is all about curiosity, and thinking about extraterrestrial life is rich ground for asking a huge range of questions. I absolutely love talking about and teaching these questions as a hook for inquiry what forms might extraterrestrial life take? What environments might they need to live? How would they communicate? Would they even want to communicate? Considering these questions also gives us insight into ourselves and our own place in the universe.

Q. What is the likelihood that aliens have, in fact, visited Earth?

A. The likelihood that extraterrestrial life has visited Earth depends on a number of assumptions. Im not going to give a specific likelihood, but I will say that with some basic assumptions, one could infer that the universe ought to be teeming with life.

Now whether extraterrestrial life is commonly able to survive and evolve into something more than a simple organism let alone develop technology and travel across the galaxy is the crux of the matter. Answering these questions goes beyond astrophysics and astrobiology into fields that dont exist yet like astrosociology and astropsychology.

Q. What kind of proof would scientists in those fields need to be sure?

A. To prove extraterrestrial life had visited Earth would require us being able to unequivocally rule out terrestrial origins, and that is tough. To prove something in the scientific sense, the phenomenon generally has to be repeatable so that hypotheses can be tested. With only fleeting and unpredictable sightings, it is virtually impossible to test hypotheses to verify or dismiss them. This leaves us wanting for real, tangible, physical artifacts that can be examined and tested by a range of scientists.

The late Arthur C. Clarke had three adages known as Clarkes Three Laws the first of which was, When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he [sic] is almost certainly right. When he [sic] states that something is impossible, he [sic] is very probably wrong. We would all do well to use the word impossible with caution.

Q. How would you feel if extraterrestrial life were discovered?

A. I would be elated. If there is no other sentient life in the galaxy, that is a huge warning sign for humans and our potential for long-term survival. And how sad it would be for this enormous and grand universe to have so few to bear witness. I also think that finding other sentient life would bring about a beautiful renaissance of human thought and knowledge. I have to believe that our worldviews would change for the better if we had a deeper understanding that we are all truly on this tiny little planet together.

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Astronomer Kelsey Johnson Reflects on the Science Behind the Search for UFOs - University of Virginia