Compact Groups of Galaxies

Compact Groups of Galaxies

View more webinars from mabishop.

The Galactic Kama Sutra: Cosmic Intimacy Explored

Galaxy accretion: Andromeda

Andormeda final

View more webinars from frato20c.

Cooking up Theories

View more presentations from moowill.

M81 and M82: A Love Story

Martin and Devon's Podcast

Structure of the Universe, Galaxy Clusters, and The Butcher-Oemler Effect from DevonMartin on Vimeo.

Compact Groups Preview

Compact Groups Preview from Daniece Mazyck on Vimeo.

Galaxy Transformaiton Trailer from molly williams on Vimeo.

Final Podcast Preview from DevonMartin on Vimeo.

Primary Thoughts

The Galactic Kama-Sutra

M31 preview

The Mystery of V838

M81 and M82- A Love Story

Galaxy Transformation in Compact Groups

Compact Groups Slides

View more presentations from akashicpen.

Galaxy Cluster Slidecast

Please enjoy.

Slidecast

View more presentations from rinn0.

Making the Hippo Dance

The folks over at Radiolab do a really excellent job of making science accessible for a broad audience. In between seasons of their show, they put out shorter pieces on their web page. In this great piece, they talk about the craft of taking the big, heavy ideas of science (the aforementioned hippo) and making them light and interesting and engaging (i.e. the dancing).


Download MP3

The Cat's Eye Nebula

By Matt Bishop and Sandra Llewellyn

There's more than meets the eye in The Cat's eye Nebula

The Eagle Nebula

Andrew Katzman & Liz Brown
Let the Eagle Soar!
The Eagle Nebula is a stunning object in our galaxy. Too bad it no longer exits...

Eta Carinae

Eta Carinae: One of the galaxy’s most massive stars.

By Kalei and Devon

Death (and Life) in 30 Doradus

By Ricardo Bilton & Gann Monroe


When stars go "boom!" babies cry, too.

The Future of Our Solar System as told by the Helix Nebula

by Ben Goldsmith and Claire Fratoni.


Enjoy!

Globular Clusters and Omega Centauri

3:30 minutes long, our podcast on Globular Clusters; enjoy.

30 Doradus

This is an image of 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula. With a span of over 1000 light years, it is the largest star forming region in the local galazy. It gets its name from spider-web like appearance of its tendrils of gas and dust. The Tarantula Nebula is found in the Large Megellanic cloud, and despite of its distance from Earth--about 170.00 light years away--it is still bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. 30 Doradus gets its brilliant brightness from the many hot, bright stars that make up a significant portion of its stellar population. Most of these stars are located in the central cluster.

The image was made with the intention of staying true to the original data. The colors were selected with careful attention to the color of the image filters, with some tweaks to bring out detail and make the image more pleasing to the eye. This image also has some adjustments to level, saturation, and constrast to make the gaseous tendrils of the "spider web" pop out against the black sky.

V838 Monocerotis

V838 Monocerotis- a star in our Milky Way galaxy that seemed to be a nova after it flared up in 2002, but which defied expectations by exploding again a month later, and then a third time after another month. Theories to explain this phenomenon include a three part planetary collision, a smaller star crashing into V838 in a three part impact, and simply an abnormal, extra dramatic nova. After the collisions these beautiful rings appeared around the star. They are a light echo: the light caused by the explosions rippling through surrounding dust, illuminating the debris as it moves through.

Astronomical photographs are generally taken with colored filters to allow the human eye to detect subtleties and colors in the sky impossible to see otherwise through the telescope; the light is too weak this far away. The filters allow only a certain wavelength to be captured, but in greater detail. In this image we have taken "red", "blue", and "green" wavelength photographs and layered them together, creating a full spectrum false-colored image of the light echo emitted after V838's explosions. Here we can see everything clearly and beautifully, from the 'blue' stars, to the 'green' dust swirling around the hot 'red' star.

The Eagle Nebula

The Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16 (M16), can be found in our own Milky Way galaxy in the Serpens constellation. It was a cluster of stars surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas and dust. It was a cluster, as opposed to is, because the nebula was actually destroyed by a supernova approximately 6,000 years ago. Since the light from the supernova will take some time to reach Earth, one can still view the Eagle Nebula through a telescope. However, the nebula will only be visible for another 1,000 years before it disappears forever. Before its unfortunate demise, the Eagle Nebula was a breeding ground for new stars. These new stars would form out of the clouds of dust and gas and begin its life as a young member of the stellar cluster. Over time, the stars age and must eventually die. The region where the Eagle Nebula was located is surrounded by these much older stars on the brink of their own destruction. If a star is big enough, when it dies out it will do so in the form of a massive explosion, known as a supernova. It was indeed one of these stars that spelled doom for the Eagle Nebula.

In the above image, the color appears through a process of creating a false-color image. This certainly makes the image more pleasing to the eye, but also gives insight to properties of the nebula. By colorizing the image, one can see more definite features of the nebula that cannot normally be seen with the human eye. The blue area of the image is the core of the gaseous clouds, with young stars surrounding it. The blue fades into a deep red/black as the clouds are much more stretched and thinned out. As a whole, the Eagle Nebula was a striking feature. So enjoy the view while it lasts!

The Cat's Eye Nebula

This is an image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula, found in the constellation Draco. It is a planetary nebula, a celestial event that occurs at the end of the life of smaller stars. Essentially, shells of gas and remnants of the outer layers of a star are expelled outwards, until there is nothing left. The Cat’s Eye Nebula is somewhat different from other planetary nebulae, as one can see that it isn’t a typical ring- or spherical shape; it seems to have multiple layers, and beautiful twists and turns in its architecture. This doesn’t mean that it is made of anything different; it is similar in composition to most astronomical objects, containing mostly hydrogen and helium: Just like our sun!

What you see here is what is known as a false-color image. If one were to look at it directly through a powerful telescope, it would appear to be grayish-white in color. This is because its light is too weak to stimulate color-sensing receptors in the human eye. Sometimes an object such as the Cat’s Eye Nebula can be more clearly seen in parts of the spectrum where we cannot perceive color. The image seen here is actually a composite of five images, each taken in a different part of the spectrum. The outer green rings represent bubbles of mass pulsations that preceded formation of the core. The red areas on the ends are the "tail" ends of bubbles formed via Interacting stellar winds. The bright yellow/orange in the center represents massive x-ray emissions from the core. Add them together and what we get is the stunning picture you see before you!

Eta Carinae

Eta Carinae is a massive star within the Milky Way. It is about 100-150 times the mass of the sun, and has only been documented for a few hundred years. With such a young massive star in our own galaxy, Astronomers have been able to find out a lot of information about the life/behaviors of massive stars. This one in particular, has a secondary star that orbits in a 5.5 year cycle, creating an interesting up-down effect of X-rays. When the stars are in the closest part of their orbit, their solar winds cross paths and produce an interesting pattern in their X-rays that appears every 5.5 years.Eta Carinae has also been known because of its giant Humunculus nebula, a cloud of dust and gas that erupted from Eta Carinae's 'great eruption' - an event from the 1840s when it shot to a magnitude -1 in a matter of months. The nebula continues to move outward, heating up to millions of degrees and reflecting the light from this first major explosion.

The white center of Eta Carinae is deemed the 'heart' of the star, where the maximum brightness is almost luminous enough to overturn its own gravity, otherwise known as the 'Eddington Limit.' The light blue areas directly encircling the 'heart' are the areas of radiation shining through the Homunculus nebula. The next layer, of yellow-orange is some of the matter from the 'great eruption,' a total of about ten solar masses. The dark red that serves as the outer ring is the lasting matter from the 1840 explosion, slowly moving into space.

Kalei Sabaratnam
& Devon Ingraham-Adie

The Helix Nebula

What will our sun look like after it dies? Above is the picturesque Helix Nebula, sometimes referred to as ‘the Eye of God.’ A planetary nebula, such as the Helix, is the remnants of a dead star. At the center of this nebula lies a white dwarf, which is a small, hot, dense star, that’s so powerful, it’s the cause of the illumination of the surrounding gas. The green area around the center contains cometary knots—globs of gas that look like comets with their tails pointing toward the center of the nebula. The rest of the nebula is made up of gas and dust left over from the star’s death.

In this false-color composite, the nebula's SII gas is shown in pink and the HaNII gas is blue. These colors combine to make the purple. Towards the interior, as mentioned, the knot-like filaments are shown in green. This is primarily Hb gas.

Omega Centauri

Omega Centauri is the largest and brightest globular cluster in the Milky Way galaxy. At 100 million light years in diameter, it is certainly a colossal being. However, Globular clusters are in fact quite small in the scheme of the universe. What makes Omega Cen, as it's commonly known, so interesting is its varied composition and the history behind it. There are two different populations of Globular clusters, denoted metal rich and metal poor, but Omega Cen actually has stars of both within its cluster; this begins to articulate its wide and varied history as a denizen of galactic space.

Globular clusters are satellite groups of stars that, although primarily found in a galaxy's center, can also be found in a wide and distant halo around a galaxy; sometimes at distances where no other debris or star systems lie in orbit of that galaxy. Because of their relatively small size, but inherent stability as a single unit, globular clusters are commonly traded between galaxies throughout galactic history; our own galaxy is in the process of stealing two globular clusters from nearby dwarf galaxies. Globular clusters are fascinating to astronomers because, even as galaxies collide and are consumed, these clusters remain relatively unaffected, only keeping bits of their pasts within themselves. Presently the most promising source for an unabridged compendium of the universe are these globular clusters.

The Seven Steps of Podcasting

We're going to start talking about actually producing a podcast next week, so it's useful at this point to introduce you to the basics. Jeffrey Daniel Frey works for a university and talks a lot about how to use podcasts in an academic environment. His "Seven Steps of Podcasting" is a nice place to start when we're thinking about the technical side of things.

Research for your Papers, Part II

Some of you have asked about the references that you should/shouldn't use for your papers. Here are my thoughts on that.

If you're a Junior or Senior and a Major or a Minor, you should use the peer-reviewed literature. This means journals like the Astronomical Journal (AJ), the Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP), Nature, Science, etc.

If you're not part of that group, you can use those references, but you can (and should) also use references like Sky & Telescope, Astronomy, Scientific American, etc. Some web sites are also good references, but you need to be a savvy consumer of web content; if you have any questions about whether a reference is appropriate, just ask me.

If you don't have much experience reading journal articles (or much experience in Astronomy), you'll probably find that journal articles are a challenge to read. In particular, journals like AJ, ApJ, A&A, MNRAS, and PASP are written for professional astronomers, so there's a certain amount of jargon that's used. Here's a strategy that's useful to use when you're reading these astronomical journals: try starting with the Abstract (which will give you a one-paragraph summary of the paper), then reading the Introduction, then the Discussion & Conclusion. If you want to go deeper, you can read the "Observation" or "Analysis" section, but most of the information that will be most useful to you is in the other sections.

Nature and Science tend to be a bit less "jargon-y", since they're written for the general scientific community, so if you can find an article in one of those journals, so much the better.

Research for your Papers

For the research papers you are writing, you need to go track down resources to help you write your paper. Most major astronomical journals are indexed by the "Astrophysics Data System" (ADS, for short), administered by the Harvard-Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory and NASA. See their search form here:

ADS at Harvard

Note that these link directly to journals, so they are subject to the subscription that each school's library has. If you would like a copy of a paper and your school doesn't have a subscription, let me know and I can get it for you. In particular, if you'd like PDFs of the pages from Scientific American or Sky & Telescope, I have access to the full pages (i.e. including pictures and figures).

Also, before journal articles are published, many authors put them up on the Astrophysics Preprint Server. This is strictly voluntary, so many papers may not be up there. But, as opposed to the Journals, it is completely free to access from anywhere in the world:

Astrophysics Preprint Server ("astro-ph")

Professionally Produced Podcasts

The field of astronomy is changing incredibly quickly. Just over 10 years ago, our view of the universe fundamentally changed with the discovery of Dark Energy. As fast as the science is changing, however, the ways of communicating that science are changing even faster. Just a few years ago, podcasts about astronomical topics were virtually nonexistent (OK: podcasts were virtually nonexistent, but still. . . ). Now, there are hundreds of science podcasts, and (at least) dozens of astronomy podcasts. Here are a few:

• Astronomy Cast is a professionally-produced podcast that typically interviews astronomers about "big ideas." These are a little longer than a typical "podcast," but they do a nice job of showing how an informal approach can work well.
  
• The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced as part of the International Year of Astronomy (2009) where anyone who wants to can contribute a podcast. Some of these are better than others.
• Slacker Astronomy has a definite informal vibe to it (as suggested by the name); they interview some interesting people and discuss many recent results in Astronomy.
• Some of you may be familiar with Stardate, which are short bits played on a number of public radio stations. Not all of the pieces are similar to what we will be producing in our class, but when they have one about science and physics, they do a good job.
  
• Although it's not exclusively astronomy, the UK-based Naked Scientists also produce a podcast about recent developments in science research and about science in general. One thing that you'll notice about this podcast is that it has much more of a "professional" feel, likely because they also produce this show for radio stations in the UK.
• Sciencepodcasters.org is a collection of several interesting science podcasts from all over. This is mostly just a collection of podcasts produced elsewhere and isn't specifically astronomy-focused, but it's a good place to look to find some good podcasting examples.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that some of the best work in audio presentation is done for the radio. It's usually more long-format material than a typical 5-10 minute podcast, but it's a great place to get inspiration. Radiolab, out of WNYC in New York, is a really excellent science show. It's not specifically about Astronomy, but they really set a gold standard for what can be done with a smart yet informal presenation of complex science topics.

Please mention any science/astronomy podcasts you like in the comments.

The Timescale of the Development of Life

Salman pointed me to a nice example of the expression of scales over at the blog of Seed Magazine. The style is a mash-up between an updated version of Sagan's Cosmic Calendar and the "Kinetic Typography" style that's recently become popular. Much as we talked about in our scales assignment and in the cosmic calendar, it really shows how much "nothing" there is between the start of things and everything that we as humans are aware of.

Powers of 10

As part of your reading/viewing work for next week, I'd like you to look at the "Powers of 10" video. This is a classic example of expressing large numbers in a way that is understandable to the general public. As with Sagan's cosmic calendar, the production values are a little dated, but it's still a great example of expressing large numbers in an interesting way.

Tell me a Story

Robert Krulwich (one of the co-hosts of RadioLab) gave a commencement speech at CalTech last Spring that really nicely expressed a lot of the reasons why it is critically important for scientists (and science communicators) to be able to inform the public about their science. In many ways, he has summed up the motivation for why we developed this class. I highly recommend it.


Download MP3

Books

The required books for this class are:

• Ideas Into Words: Mastering the Craft of Science Writing by Elise Hancock. This is a great, concise book on the art of writing about science.
  
• Galaxies and the Cosmic Frontier by Bill Waller and Paul Hodge (also available at the publisher's web page here). This is an excellent book on galaxies and galaxy evolution that hits just the right topics for this class.
  

I've put the Amazon links here, but feel free to get them wherever you want (they are not, however, in your campus bookstores). I've also put a third book on reserve in many of the libraries that my prove useful to you. It's called "The Hands-on Guide for Science Communicators" and is more a guide for press officers than anything else. However, there is still some good stuff in there and there will occasionally be optional readings from it.