Archive for September, 2023

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Week Ending

Posted in Biographical on September 22, 2023 by telescoper

It’s Friday, and the end of my last week in Maynooth for a while. I’m about to go out for farewell drinks, which I hope won’t be too heavy a session as I’m rather tired.

The list of things I had to do before leaving – both domestic and professional – is now down to manageable proportions. I spent today doing some bits and bobs around the house, including hacking down some ivy off the front of the house, and unblocking a gutter and a drain. These were necessary interventions, as the may have caused trouble while I am away.

I also got myself a haircut. At some point I’ll have to get my hair cut in Spain but I’m not sufficiently fluent to be confident of asking what I want doing, so I’ve had a trim here in to delay the need. Something I’ve remarked upon before is that, for a small town, Maynooth has quite a lot of barbers. I have no idea how many there are in Barcelona. Maybe I’ll just take my clippers and do a DIY job, or let it grow like I did during lockdown…

I’m glad I’ll have a house-sitter while I am away, just to keep an eye on things. She dropped off some belongings at my house already. There’s rather a lot and the spare bedroom is small, but she’ll have the run of the rest of the place so it should be OK. I hope she’ll be comfortable.

There’s been a significant amount of Euclid activity to deal with, as well as some OJAp business, but I think most of that will have to wait a few days until I am settled in Barcelona. I leave on Sunday afternoon, 24th September, and only just found out that Monday 25th September is a local public holiday in Barcelona, so it looks like I’ll have a day of enforced relaxation…

Anyway, I’m reliably informed that the weather in Barcelona is set fair at about 25°C while here in Maynooth it’s showery and more like 14°C. Experts say there’s no correlation between cold damp weather and arthritis pain, but it has certainly felt like there is recently. Hopefully the warmer climate will help.

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Exploring the Cosmos at Maynooth

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on September 21, 2023 by telescoper

Regular readers of this blog – both of them – may remember that last year there was an event at Maynooth University entitled Exploring the Cosmos which was very well attended, with over 400 people showing up. That event was held during Space Week 2022 and it was such a success that it’s being repeated during this year’s Space Week.

I gave a talk at last year’s event but won’t be there this year as I’ll be away on sabbatical. Some of the other speakers are different too. The fact that the line-up has changes is good because it means that people who came last year will get a different set of presentations.

On the 5th of October, at 6.30pm, in the TSI Building Maynooth University will host an all-ages event to explore the vastness of space. Using stunning visualisations Maynooth University Astrophysicists will examine star and planet formation, peer back in time with our physicists trying to image the very edges of our visible universe, and take a journey into the unknown as we trace the origin and evolution of black holes.

Programme:

18.30 Welcome

18.35: John Regan: “Black Holes in Our Universe”

Black Holes are among the most exotic objects in our Universe. In this talk John will discuss the basics of black hole formation, how we can detect them today and the future of black hole hunting using gravitational wave observatories that Maynooth University is a part of. John will also discuss some of the strange effects you might encounter near a black hole – like time slowing down!

18.55: Aoibhinn Gallagher: “The Dark Universe”

There is so much in our universe which is unknown to us, most of it in fact. What is dark matter, what is dark energy? We will go on a journey during this talk through the history of our universe and the history of cosmology (the study of the universe) itself to try and arrive at answers to these questions. Also I will talk about the real life science happening at Maynooth university on these very topics.

19.15: Tea & Coffee Break

19.45: Neil Trappe: “Seeing the Invisible Universe – Terahertz Astronomy”

When you look outside at the clear night sky you will see many thousands of stars overheard. The Moon, stars, planets, comets and galaxies can all be observed if you know where to look just using your eyes, binoculars or a telescope.

Astronomers spend many hours looking at the night sky with large automated telescopes from many exotic places around the world to add to our knowledge of the Universe and understand difficult questions like how did the Sun and our Solar System form, how are stars born and how do they die, is there life elsewhere in the Universe, and indeed how did the Universe come into existence at all?

In Maynooth University a team of researchers develop telescopes to see the Universe with different kinds of light, specifically far infrared or “terahertz” light. Why do we do this – we see the Universe differently and can learn lots more information ‘seeing’ with terahertz radiation that is invisible to our eyes.

20.05: Patrick Kavanagh: “The First Year of the James Webb Space Telescope”

The James Webb Space Telescope has made unexpected and groundbreaking discoveries almost routine in its first year. It has produced captivating images of our own Solar System, measured the content of atmospheres around other stars, viewed the stellar birth and death in amazing detail, revealed the skeletal structure of galaxies, and peered deep in to the cosmic past in search of the first stars and galaxies. In this talk Dr. Kavanagh will give an overview of Webb and present some of the highlights of the first year of this revolutionary telescope.

20.30: Finish

It should be a fun evening. If you’re around please come along. This event is free to attend but you need to register, which you can do here. Please feel free to share this with friends and colleagues.

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An Open Letter to the Times Higher World University Rankers

Posted in Bad Statistics, Education with tags , , , , , , on September 20, 2023 by telescoper

Dear Rankers,

I note with interest that you have announced significant changes to the methodology deployed in the construction of this years forthcoming league tables. I would like to ask what steps you will take to make it clear to that any changes in institutional “performance” (whatever that is supposed to mean) could well be explained simply by changes in the metrics and how they are combined?,

I assume, as intelligent and responsible people, that you did the obvious test for this effect, i.e. to construct and publish a parallel set of league tables, with this year’s input data but last year’s methodology, which would make it easy to isolate changes in methodology from changes in the performance indicators.  This is a simple test that anyone with any scientific training would perform.

You have not done this on any of the previous occasions on which you have introduced changes in methodology. Perhaps this lamentable failure of process was the result of multiple oversights. Had you deliberately withheld evidence of the unreliability of your conclusions you would have left yourselves open to an accusation of gross dishonesty, which I am sure would be unfair.

Happily, however, there is a very easy way to allay the fears of the global university community that the world rankings are being manipulated. All you need to do is publish a set of league tables using the 2022 methodology and the 2023 data. Any difference between this table and the one you published would then simply be an artefact and the new ranking can be ignored.

I’m sure you are as anxious as anyone else to prove that the changes this year are not simply artificially-induced “churn”, and I look forward to seeing the results of this straightforward calculation published in the Times Higher as soon as possible, preferably next week when you announce this years league tables.

I look forward to seeing your response to the above through the comments box, or elsewhere. As long as you fail to provide a calibration of the sort I have described, this year’s league tables will be even more meaningless than usual. Still, at least the Times Higher provides you with a platform from which you can apologize to the global academic community for wasting their time and that of others.

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Barcelona – Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballé

Posted in Barcelona, Music with tags , , on September 19, 2023 by telescoper

Oh go on, then. No explanation necessary…

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Welcome (and Goodbye) Week

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on September 18, 2023 by telescoper

So Welcome Week has started in Maynooth, although I’m keeping a low profile ahead of my departure to foreign climes and haven’t seen any of the new students, who I’m assured definitely exist. I will be on campus tomorrow though as I have various things to do in my office before handing over the keys until next year. I think pint or two may well be drunk at some point this week to celebrate my departure too.

Although I’m not involved in Welcome Week activities, this week is nevertheless going to be extremely busy, and not just because of preparations for my trip to Barcelona. After a short hiatus in December, Euclid developments are well and truly back and I’ve got a stack of telecons to deal with. I had three today, and that’s just the start. I won’t get away from those while on sabbatical, of course, but at least I don’t have to organize them around teaching and other departmental activities.

I was chatting with my PhD student online this afternoon and it struck me that this will be the first time since 2020 that the Autumn Semester will start properly at Maynooth and students will get a full twelve weeks of in-person teaching with a study week. For the three previous years, teaching started late for new students because of a knock-on effect of the Leaving Certificate results being delayed by Covid-19 reasons. That meant that there was a truncated orientation process and term was a week shorter, i.e. 11 weeks instead of 12. I have been teaching first year physics students during that period, and it was quite a headache figuring out how to tweak things to make everything fit without rushing too much. Now all that is behind us, and a more relaxed start of term is possible, but it’s my successor in the role of first-year lecturer who will reap the benefit.

Teaching term starts later in Maynooth than in many other Irish universities. This year lectures commence on 25th September, a week today, by which time I’ll be in Barcelona. This has its advantages, but the disadvantage is that teaching is supposed to carry on until Friday December 22nd, just three days before Christmas…

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Memories of Barcelona

Posted in Architecture, Art, Biographical with tags , , , on September 17, 2023 by telescoper

I’ve had this poster for 30 years. It’s survived several relocations and is now on my bedroom wall in Maynooth. I bought it on a holiday in Barcelona in 1993 which, coincidentally, was the centenary of the birth of Joan Miró, and the reason for a special exhibition.

Since it’s a rainy Sunday afternoon and I’m feeling a bit nostalgic with just a week to go before I go to Barcelona once more, I thought I’d rummage through some boxes of old photographs to share some pictures taken on that trip in 1993. The first one is me being a bit scared on the funicular railway. The last picture shows my holiday mate David in blue (to the centre left) looking rather fetching from the rear as he ponders the Sagrada Familia:

Back in 1993 the Sagrada Familia was basically a building site. Thirty years on, it still isn’t finished but will be completed in 2026. Possibly. So I’m told.

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15 Years In The Dark

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff on September 15, 2023 by telescoper

When I logged onto WordPress yesterday I received a message that it was the 15th anniversary of my registration with them, which is when I took my first step into the blogosphere. That was way back on 15th September 2008.

I actually wrote my first post on the day I registered but unfortunately I didn’t really know what I was doing on my first day at blogging – no change there, then – and I didn’t actually manage to figure out how to publish this earth-shattering piece. It was only after I’d written my second post that I realized that the first one wasn’t actually visible to the general public because I hadn’t pressed the right buttons, so the two appear in the wrong order in my archive.

Such was the inauspicious beginning of this “shitty WordPress blog”!

Since then I have published 6507 blog posts posts which have received well over 5M page views. The largest number of hits I have received in a single day is still 8,864 (in 2014, at the peak of the BICEP2 controversy). Scientifically we’ve seen the discovery of the Higgs Boson and gravitational waves, both of which resulted in Nobel Prizes, as did the studies of high-redshift supernovae. The Planck mission mission was launched, did its stuff, and came to a conclusion in this time too. Most recently we have had the launch of JWST and have started to see the first science results. Euclid was launched earlier this year. Science at least has moved forward, even many other things have not.

This year saw my 60th birthday, so I’ve been blogging for about 25% of my life so far. I’ll have to keep going until I’m 90 to reach 50%…

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New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics

Posted in OJAp Papers, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on September 15, 2023 by telescoper

Time to announce yet another new paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one is hot off the press and was published today (15th September 2023).

The latest paper is the 36th  so far in Volume 6 (2023) and the 101st in all. The authors are Kareem El-Badry (Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, USA), Kevin Burdge (Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA), Jan van Roestel (Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy, University of Amsterdam,NL) & Antonio C. Rodriguez (Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, USA).

The primary classification for this paper is Solar and Stellar Astrophysics and its title is “A transiting brown dwarf in a 2 hour orbit”.  The article reports the discovery of a brown dwarf in a very short orbit around a low-mass star with a discussion about the evolution of this orbit probably due to magnetic braking. Amazingly, the entire binary system would fit comfortably inside the Sun (although that’s not actually where it is).

Anyway, here is a screen grab of the overlay of the published version which includes the  abstract:

 

 

You can click on the image of the overlay to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.

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Enquiring into UK Astronomy

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on September 14, 2023 by telescoper

Apparently I still have a few readers in the UK, so I thought I’d share a bit of news aimed at them.

It seems the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee of the House of Commons has initiated an inquiry into ” how well placed the UK astronomy sector is to showcase the UK as a science superpower and maximise its leadership in international programmes”. Apparently this will examine the status of the UK’s astronomical research base and assets, UK access to international astronomical facilities and contribution to international programmes. It will also explore astronomy’s potential contribution to the UK economy and what considerations should inform the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s next Strategic Delivery Plan, due in 2026. 

I don’t know why STFC doesn’t just use ChatGPT to write its strategic plan like everyone else, but there you go.

Anyway, the Committee welcomes submissions addressing any or all of the following:

  • The strengths and weaknesses of UK astronomy and how these compare to other nations
  • The opportunities and challenges facing UK astronomy and whether it is receiving sufficient support
  • What the aims and focus of UK astronomy should be
  • The extent to which UK astronomy contributes to the UK’s status as a science superpower
  • Whether the UK is maximising the contribution that astronomy can make to the wider UK economy
  • What role astronomy is playing in encouraging greater diversity and inclusion in STEM and public interest in science

To find out more information and/or submit a submission go here. The deadline is 27th October.

Have fun!

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Astronomy Volunteers Needed!

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , on September 14, 2023 by telescoper

NASA apparently needs volunteers for an upcoming a forthcoming analysis:

From Private Eye

I’m not sure whether this involves a telescope, or an endoscope, or some other device yet to be erected, but I am always prepared to bend over backwards to help such initiatives. If you are similarly receptive, please apply to NASA. I’m sure they’ll be gratified by your submission.

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