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Euclid in Space!

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff on July 16, 2023 by telescoper

I saw this little movie on the ESA Update page for Euclid and couldn’t resist sharing it here. It’s a montage of images from the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT); the object you see moving upwards in the centre of the frame is none other than the Euclid spacecraft, hurtling towards its destination at the 2nd Lagrange Point. You will see other moving objects. I’m not sure what they are but the field is in the ecliptic plane so they’re likely to be small solar system objects, probably asteroids.

Incidentally, people keep asking me for updates about Euclid. Although I am privy to the regular updates available to members of the Euclid Consortium, I am not allowed to publish anything on here that’s not already in the public domain nor would I want to, lest anyone think I would presume to speak on behalf of either ESA or the Euclid Consortium via the medium of a personal blog. You can follow the official updates here from people who actually understand everything that is going on!

I will just say that all the key steps so far – a critical orbit manoeuvre needed to get into the correct trajectory for L2, a temporary rotation of the spacecraft to allow it to heat up and to allow residual gas to evaporate, deployment of the high-gain antenna (essential to send data back to Earth), and the switching on of the two instruments (NISP and VIS) – have taken place in good order. There is however a long way to go before everything is tested, verified, calibrated and ready for action. It’s a very busy time for the engineers and instrumentalists; we just need to give them the time they need to work their technical magic!

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Astronomical Observatories on Indigenous Land

Posted in Euclid, Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on July 15, 2023 by telescoper

I’ve been meaning to post about for some time about the use of telescopes all around the world that reside in observatories on lands previously and/or presently occupied by indigenous peoples. The creation of these astronomical facilities has been accompanied by neglect (and sometimes violent displacement) of tribal communities native to the land on which they now stand. Though we exploit native lands for science, the astronomical community makes little reference to the people who are directly impacted by the advancement of astronomy through colonialism of this sort.

I know I’m not alone in thinking that, at the very least as a community we should do much more to acknowledge our use of astronomical facilities built on land that in many cases was basically “stolen” by colonial settlers. There was a talk about this issue at the recent Euclid Consortium Meeting in Copenhagen, and it came up at the National Astronomy Meeting in Cardiff in the context of the broad issue of the decolonization of astronomy.

Anyway, just for a start I have included here a small gallery of images of modern astronomical observatories of various kinds, with captions giving the names not of the observatory, but of the indigenous peoples upon whose land it is built:

Kānaka Maoli
Diaguita
Wallmapu, Chango
Wajari Yamaji
Quechua, Diaguita, Uru, Chichas, Lickananta
Diaguita
San, Khoi Khoi

There are many more than these, but hopefully you get the point. The question is: what to do about it?

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Maynooth in the News

Posted in Biographical, Euclid, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on July 12, 2023 by telescoper

I was in a meeting this morning at which it was mentioned that the recent launch of the Euclid satellite has generated quite a lot of publicity in the news media for Maynooth University. There’s a piece in the Sunday Times (Ireland Edition), another in Silicon Republic, and an online feature for RTÉ Brainstorm as well as a radio segment on Morning Ireland and another on NewsTalk.

Maynooth University plugged these items in on the “Maynooth in the News” feed on its main webpage, along with many other items that show the University in a good light.

Conspicuous by its absence from that feed, however, is the biggest story surrounding Maynooth University in recent days, namely the appalling decision by the President to scrap elections to the Governing Authority of the University in favour of having representatives chosen only by the President. This is just one example of the increasingly intransigent and authoritarian management of the University. Can anyone justify the complete disenfranchisement of the staff of the University from the Governance of the university? Or that an Executive body should select the Board to which it is supposed to be accountable?

I know I’m not the only person employed by this University who thinks this decision is a terrible one – my Union, IFUT is strongly opposed- but it has been already been imposed and now we have no say. At least you can read about, e.g. here in the Times Higher.

One story you can’t read about however concerns the outcomes of Maynooth University’s “Staff Climate and Culture Survey” which was carried out in 2022 with the promise made to participants that results would be published in early 2023. No such results were ever communicated to staff and all mention of this survey has been wiped off the University’s web pages. I don’t know why this happened, but I venture to suggest that if the results had been good the Maynooth publicity team would not have hesitated to publish them.

Since the Management of Maynooth University has chosen to close off any internal channels by which academic and other staff can communicate their views, it seems that the only means of communication open to us is via the external media. Perhaps the Times Higher will run a story on the Curious Case of the Missing Staff Survey?

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Euclid Update

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on July 10, 2023 by telescoper

The Euclid spacecraft launched over a week ago so so here’s a short video explaining its trajectory and what it will do over the next weeks and months.

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Brainstorm Flash

Posted in Biographical, Euclid, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff on July 6, 2023 by telescoper
Euclid being launched on a Falcon 9 rocket on 1st July 2023

The media activity surrounding the launch of Euclid on Saturday continues. Yesterday a piece by yours truly appeared on RTÉ Brainstorm with the title All you need to know about Euclid’s six year space mission. It subsequently got picked up by the main RTÉ News website on their News Lens panel, although it’s in second place after a story about a hot-dog eating competition:

P.S. There is also piece in siliconrepublic based on an interview with me here.

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Opening the National Astronomy Meeting

Posted in Cardiff, Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on July 3, 2023 by telescoper

My first impressions of Cardiff after arriving yesterday is that a lot of things have changed. That sadly includes the fact that a number of my favourite places in the city centre have closed. On the other hand, some thing have improved. The Centre for Student Life, for example, is completely new since my days here and is a definite improvement on the previous dingy premises. It also just happens to be where the plenary sessions of the 2023 National Astronomy Meeting are being held:

Centre for Student Life
Mark Drakeford addresses the opening Plenary

The first plenary session of the week was opened by the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, who gave very a nice speech, in which he spoke very knowledgeably of the inspirational nature of astronomy as well as the history of the subject in Wales. It was a very impressive start to the week!

The Vice-chancellor of Cardiff University, Colin Riordan, was also there.

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To Cardiff

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, The Universe and Stuff on July 2, 2023 by telescoper
Cardiff Castle

So I’m here in sunny Cardiff for the UK National Astronomy Meeting which is taking place here from tomorrow 3rd July until Friday 7th July. I’m here all week!

On my way here this morning, in Dublin Airport, I picked up a copy of the Sunday Times Ireland edition to find this:

Sunday Times Ireland 2/7/2023.

It’s not a bad piece except I’m uncomfortable about being in the same subheading as Elon Musk! More amusingly still, my piece is next to a story about how your sex life needn’t stop when you reach 50. I wish someone had told me that 10 years ago!

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Countdown to the Euclid Launch

Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on July 1, 2023 by telescoper

Today’s the day! Weather permitting, of course, all eyes will be on Cape Canaveral for the launch of the Euclid satellite later this afternoon (as reckoned in Ireland). You can watch the launch on YouTube via the following stream (but it won’t start until 15.30 Irish Time; 16.30 CEST):

The Key Events to look for in local time are:

16:12 Euclid launch on SpaceX Falcon 9
16:53 Separation of Euclid from Falcon 9
16:57 Earliest expected time to establish communication with Euclid

After that, the mission is handed over to the ESA Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany as it sets out for the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. Approximately four weeks after launch, Euclid will enter in orbit around this point, which is located at 1.5 million km from Earth, in the opposite direction from the Sun. Once in orbit, mission operators will start verifying all the functions of the telescope. During this, residual water is outgassed, after which Euclid’s instruments will be turned on. Between one and three months after launch, Euclid will go through several calibrations and scientific performance tests and get ready for science. The telescope begins its early phase of the survey of the Universe three months after launch. There will be a preliminary release of a small amount of data in December 2024, but the first full data release – DR1 – will take about two years.

UPDATE: All critical stages of the launch passed satisfactorily, and contact has been established with the ground control. Euclid is now on its way to L2. Bon Voyage, Euclid!

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Pushing Euclid

Posted in Biographical, Euclid, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on June 30, 2023 by telescoper

I’ve spent a sizeable chunk of the last two days answering press enquiries concerning the Euclid mission, due to be launch about 24 hours from now. Here is a picture of Euclid in the Falcon 9 fairing, getting ready to be moved to the launch facility. It’s all getting very real!

After talking with their researcher yesterday, this morning I did a short interview on Morning Ireland, which is on RTÉ Radio 1. It was shorter than I imagined because the previous item – about the ongoing ructions at RTÉ over various financial scandals – understandably overran quite a bit. The presenter, Rachel English, was very nice though and I think it went fairly well. I did another short interview on Newstalk Radio on a programme called Hard Shoulder, which took place at 5.48pm. I also spoke to a journalist from the Sunday Times Irish Edition, who I think will run a story on Sunday.

Anyway, the purpose of this media stuff is not to try to grab headlines – my involvement in Euclid is very small, really – but to generate some interest in the hope that Ireland takes a more active role in future space missions. I don’t know whether it will work, but I hope it does, and I feel obliged to try although it has made for a very busy day indeed!

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NANOGrav Newsflash!

Posted in Astrohype, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on June 29, 2023 by telescoper

In a post earlier this week I wrote that

There is a big announcement scheduled for Thursday by the NANOGrav collaboration. I don’t know what is on the agenda, but I suspect it may be the detection of a stochastic gravitational wave background using pulsar timing measurements. I may of course be quite wrong about that, but will blog about it anyway.

The press conference is not until 1pm EDT (6pm Irish Time) but the papers have already arrived and it appears I was correct in my inference. The papers can be found here, along with a summary. The main results paper is entitled The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background. Here is the abstract (click on the image to make it bigger):

In a nutshell, this evidence differs from the direct detection of gravitational waves by interferometric experiments, such as Advanced LIGO, in that it: (a) does not detect individual sources but an integrated background produced by many sources; (b) it is sensitive to much longer gravitational waves (measured in light-years rather than kilometres).; and (c) the statistical evidence of this detection is far less clear-cut.

While Advanced LIGO can – and does – detect gravitational waves from mergers of stellar mass black holes, the NANOGrav signal would correspond to similar events involving much more massive objects – supermassive black holes (SMBHs) – with masses exceeding a million times the mass of the Sun, such as the one found in the Galactic Centre. If this is the right interpretation, the signal will provide important information about how many such mergers are happening across the Universe and hence about the formation of such objects and their host galaxies.

SMBH mergers are not the only possible source of the NANOGrav signal, however, and you can bet your bottom dollar that there will now be an avalanche of theory papers on the arXiv purporting to explain the results in terms of more exotic models.

Incidentally, for a nice explanation of the Hellings-Downs correlation, see here. The figure from the paper is

I haven’t had time to go through the papers in detail so won’t comment on the results, at least partly because I find the presentation of the statistical results in the abstract a very confusing jumble of Bayesian and frequentist language which I find hard to penetrate. Hopefully it will make more sense when I have time to read the papers and/or when I watch the announcement later.

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