The BOOTES-3 telescope is being transported from its original home near Blenheim to the NIWA station near Lauder.
The BOOTES-3 telescope, also known as the Yock-Allen telescope, is a robotic telescope designed for the rapid observation of transient astrophysical phenomena, such as the optical counterparts to gamma-ray bursts.
I found out about the new Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge from Lord Rees’ TED talk:
The CSER was founded by Lord Rees (Astronomer Royal, President of the Royal Society 2005 – 2010), Huw Price (Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosopy) and Jaan Tallin (founder of Skype). The list of advisors to the CSER include Max Tegmark, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk.
The CSER’s interest in fragile networks has clear resonance with Geoff Austin’s work on networks of resources. The theory of networks – fragile and otherwise – will be of interest to Te Pūnaha Matatini: The Centre for Complex Systems and Networks.
Hello, thanks for visiting our blog. For those who are curious about me and my study, let me introduce myself here.
As mentioned by Dr. Nicholas Rattenbury in his latest post, I am one of his PhD candidates, along with Ashna Sharan. My research is focused on eclipsing binaries that I’ll be looking at to searching for any signals of extrasolar planets from MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) dataset. It isn’t an easy project, full of challenge and uncertainty, but, at least as I find it to date, playful and joyful as well.
As a person who grew up in Hong Kong, the most light-polluted and money-oriented city in the world, I feel exquisitely fortunate to have been on the southern hemisphere, here and there, to study astronomy. Yup, indeed I graduated from Monash University in Australia with BSc(Hons), first class. During the honours year, I picked up a project on X-ray study of supernova remnant SNR W28. Now, thanks to Dr. Nicholas Rattenbury, I am being at the University of Auckland as an optical astronomer. “Low” energy, yet exciting.
Hello there. I am a PhD candidate investigating the use of GPUs in modelling planetary microlensing events, as Nicholas Rattenbury mentioned in his recent post. We have on hand a GPU-based code for modelling and simulating gravitational microlensing events. The immediate goal of my project is to use the GPU-based code to model real microlensing events and searching for extra-solar planets. Future work could potentially involve introducing concepts of Swarm Intelligence to optimize the parameter search strategy in finding the best-fit model.
On another note, I completed my MSc in Mathematics at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji, having a Mathematics and Physics background at the undergraduate level. I have always been interested in Astronomy and find myself fortunate that Department of Physics, University of Auckland gave me the opportunity to pursue it! I expect a challenging yet exciting ride ahead of me, as I journey through my PhD candidacy!
A warm welcome to the newly arrived post-graduate students who have joined me in working on microlensing and time-domain astronomy!
Ashna Sharan (PhD candidate) has started her research into using GPU processors to model planetary microlensing events. Alex Li (PhD candidate) is investigating eclipsing binary events in the MOA database, looking for signals owing to extra-solar planets. Martin Donachie (MSc candidate) is developing algorithms to classify the millions of light curves in the MOA database.
Exciting discovery of a planet in a microlensing event!
Artist’s impression of the binary star system and the newly discovered planet. Adapted from image by Cheongho Han, Chungbuk National University, Korea.
Here is the University of Auckland’s press release:
Astronomers discover terrestrial planet in binary star system
New Zealand scientists are among an international team that has discovered an Earth-sized planet with an Earth-like orbit in a binary star system, the first terrestrial planet with an Earth-like orbit ever discovered in this commonly found star system.
Binary star systems are made up of two stars orbiting each other. Half the stars in our Galaxy are in binary systems.
The latest discovery expands astronomers’ understanding of where Earth-like planets can form and, potentially at least, whether or not they might be habitable.
The new planet is 3000 light years away and twice the mass of Earth. It orbits one of two stars in its binary system at about the same distance Earth orbits the Sun. But the star it orbits is much dimmer than our Sun, meaning the planet is extremely cold, around -210C, and unlikely to harbor life on its surface as we know it.
“This discovery is exciting because we weren’t certain that terrestrial planets could form around one star of a binary star system,” says University of Auckland Department of Physics senior lecturer Nicholas Rattenbury. “This tells us there are many more stars in our Galaxy that could potentially be the host star to habitable planets.”
New Zealand astronomers from Auckland, Massey and Canterbury universities contributed to this latest discovery along with amateur astronomers and staff at Auckland’s Stardome Observatory. The results are published today in Science with sixty-four authors named.
Scientists used a technique known as microlensing to detect the planet. Microlensing discovers planets by measuring how the gravity of a planet and its host star deflects light coming from background stars. By measuring how a background star appears to change brightness through the gravitational “lens” effect of the foreground star, astronomers can tell whether there is also a planet orbiting the foreground star.
Dr Rattenbury said working with such a big team of astronomers from around the world had been a thrill.
“Twenty years ago, the first extra-solar planet discoveries were being made. Today, we find it likely the Galaxy is teeming with planets. Will some of them harbour life? That is of course the big question.”
The research appears in the July 4th issue of Science:
A terrestrial planet in a ~1-AU orbit around one member of a ∼15-AU binary, A. Gould et al., Science, 4 July 2014: 46-49.
This year’s Pickering Lecture was given by the present director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr Charles Elachi.
The most memorable part of his excellent talk was the “7 minutes of terror” video about the descent of Curiosity onto the surface of Mars.
The 18th annual conference on microlensing was held in Santa Barbara in January. The main topic was of course planetary microlensing, with a great deal of discussion centred on getting results of new planetary systems out quickly.
Three-lens systems are also of particular interest for many people in the field, especially as the power of microlensing to detect multiple-planet systems has been demonstrated.
And there was a great day out at the California Science Centre:
I have a number of research interests, but my main field of work is in the discovery of extra-solar planets using the technique of gravitational microlensing.
My other research interests include Galactic structure, machine learning, genetic algorithms and massive dataset mining.
If you’ve got any questions about my research topics, feel free to contact me.
My research initially focused on the study of massive stars. I have investigated the importance of mass loss and duplicity in stellar evolution (Eldridge & Tout, 2004; Eldridge & Vink, 2006; Eldridge, Izzard & Tout, 2008). I have actively collaborated with many astronomers to model progenitors of core-collapse supernovae and compare my models with observations (e.g. Eldridge et al. 2007, Pastorello et al., 2007; Mattila et al., 2008; Stancliffe & Eldridge, 2009,Fraser et al., in prep). I have also written a review on supernova progenitors (Eldridge, 2008) for the Royal Society. This work culminated in accurately identifying the progenitors of type IIP supernovae as red supergiants (Smartt et al., 2009).
An offshoot of my research played a key role in understanding the evolution of stars near the minimum mass for a core-collapse supernovae. I showed that these super-AGB stars are unlikely to be the supernova progenitors as previously suspected (Eldridge, Mattila & Smartt, 2007). Recently there have been more observed supernova progenitors near this minimum mass with luminosities less than those expected from stellar models. By varying the model physics I have shown that the luminosities are achievable but only by varying uncertain physics within the stellar models, such as increasing the carbon burning rate (Fraser et al., in prep). Continue Reading…