@AstroCanada for the week of October 21 - Michele Bannister

Dr. Michele Bannister is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Research Council Canada in Victoria, BC. The small icy worlds beyond Neptune provide insights into the early history of the Solar System. Michele is interested in understanding how they formed, evolved and reached their present orbits, and in the landforms of their surface ices.

Michele also finds time to write poetry!

@AstroCanada for the week of October 14 - Pauline Barmby

This week @AstroCanada features Dr. Pauline Barmby. Pauline is an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Western Ontario. Her research interests are in observational extragalactic astronomy, specifically studies of galaxies and star clusters.

In her spare time Pauline enjoys reading science fiction, listening to podcasts, curling and knitting (she says the last is fun to do during long meetings)

@AstroCanada for the week of October 7 - Sarah Gallagher

This week @AstroCanada features Dr. Sarah Gallagher. Sarah is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Western Ontario. Her research focuses on investigating the nature of winds from luminous quasars using observatories from the infrared to the X-ray including NASA's Spitzer and Chandra telescopes in space.

@AstroCanada for the Week of Sept 30 - Alex Parker

@AstroCanada for the Week of Sept 30 - Alex Parker

This week @AstroCanada features Dr. Alex Parker. Alex is an astronomer and planetary scientist at the University of California Berkeley.
His research interests revolve around the formation and evolution of planetary systems: Asteroid and Kuiper-Belt Object dynamics and surface processes, detection and characterization of extrasolar planetary systems and protoplanetary disks, and planetary geology. Alex also does some very cool visualization work.

You can follow Alex at his personal blog - planetsabove.blogspot.com

@AstroCanada for the Week of Sept 23 - Jason Kalirai

This week @AstroCanada features Dr. Jason Kalirai. Jason is an astronomer at STScI, and studies the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies in the local universe. His current research interests involve imaging and spectroscopic observations of resolved stellar populations, such as nearby star clusters and dwarf galaxies.

Jason is also the  Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA's next flagship astrophysics mission. To read more about JWST, please visit the STScI JWST page (for astronomers) and the Webb telescope site (for the public).

@AstroCanada Tweeter this Week - Dennis Crabtree

@AstroCanada - Week of September 16

The first person to take over the new @AstroCanada account is Dennis Crabtree, an astronomer with the National Research Council's Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics programs. Dennis is located at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, BC. He manages the time allocation process for Canada's three main offshore telescopes - CFHT, Gemini and JCMT. Dennis also maintains a database of papers published by the major telescopes and tracks these telescope's productivity (# of papers published) and their scientific impact (# of citations).

Canadian Astronomers Discover Earth's First Companion Asteroid

We're all familiar with Earth's large companion, better known as the Moon. Well it turns out that our planet has another, albeit much smaller, companion that has just been discovered by Canadian astronomers.

The companion is an asteroid, named 2010 TK7, and is about 300 metres across. Among the many thousands of asteroids known, most are simply orbiting the sun in a band between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. However, there is a special class named Trojan asteroids because they orbit around one of the two Lagrangian points which lie 60° ahead of and behind the larger body. in its orbit. Jupiter has a large number of Trojan asteroids, possible as many as exist in the main asteroid belt.

So while Trojans have been associated with Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and even Mars, none had been known to be associated with the Earth.  Astronomers had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the Sun from Earth's point of view.

2010 TK7 was initialized discovered by the WISE orbiting infrared telescope which afforded astronomers a different perspective that they usually get from Earth-bound telescopes. Once this object was identified as an interesting candidate, followup observations with Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on Mauna Kea confirmed that 2010 TK7 was indeed the first Earth Trojan.

There are likely to be many more Earth Trojans and now that the first one has been identified the race will be on to discover more.

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Canadian Universities Join New Telescope Consortium

Canada is a world leader in astrophysical research and much of this leadership depends on access to forefront, world-class telescopes. Astronomer's push to understand the Universe depends on building ever more powerful, and specialized, telescopes. This push has seen telescopes grow from Galileo's 2.5 cm (0.025 m) specimen to the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).

One other significant change from Galileo's day is that astronomer's now use telescopes that span most of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum from gamma rays to long wavelength radio waves. Each part of  the EM spectrum offers a different perspective on the Universe and the ability to investigate different processes.

The new proposed telescope that seven Canadian universities have joined is the Cerro Chajnantor Atacama Telescope (CCAT) which will be located high in the Atacama desert in northern Chile. CCAT will be the world's largest telescope viewing the Universe in sub-millimeter radio waves. This type of telescope is extremely useful for studying galaxies in the very young Universe. This was a very active time for galaxy and star formation.

The telescope was located in Chile for two very important reasons. The first is that the site is ideal for this type of telescope, It is "high and dry" which means that the observations will not be hampered by the atmosphere. The second reason is that the soon to be completed ALMA telescope will be located very near by and these two telescopes will complement each other extremely well. ALMA works in the same part of the EM spectrum and will be able to study the galaxies discovered by CCAT in exquisite detail.

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100 Years of Variable Star Observing

This year, 2011, marks the 100th anniversary of the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). Despite its name, the AAVSO is a truly international organization, with members in just about every country. It's a fantastic example of collaboration between professional, semi-professional, and amateur astronomers.

The focus of the AAVSO is variable stars--a type of star whose brightness varies over time, usually in a cyclic pattern. Variable stars play an extremely important role in astronomy. Certain types of variable stars obey an interesting relationship, whereby the time it takes for them to complete a cycle of brightness changes--from dim, to bright, and back to dim again--is related to the amount of light they are emitting on average. This means that, if we can measure how long it takes a variable star to go through a brightness cycle, we can work out how bright the star is intrinsically. Knowing how bright the star is intrinsically, we can work out how far away it must be to appear as bright as it does to observers on Earth. Variable stars are often the only means we have to determine the distances to celestial objects.

Many variable stars are easily visible from Earth with a small telescope. A few are even visible to the naked eye. They are popular targets for amateur astronomers. Every year, the AAVSO collects more than half a million observations of variable stars from amateur astronomers around the world. They catalog these observations and make them available to everyone. Many of their results have been used by professional astronomers in scientific publications. Canadian astronomers are among the AAVSO's strongest supporters. John Percy, past president of the AAVSO and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, has relied on AAVSO data for years and has been instrumental in encouraging participation in AAVSO activities.

This year, the AAVSO is celebrating 100 years of "citizen science". Among the celebratory activities is a challenge to observers the world over to observe 100 variable stars in 100 days. Some eager Canadians have already completed the challenge. Why not try to observe a few variable stars yourself? The AAVSO publishes a handy guide to help you get started.

Strange New Worlds

University of Toronto astronomy professor Ray Jayawardhana's first popular science book, Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System is now in wide release. It's in its second week on the Canadian non-fiction best-seller list, according to Maclean's. Congratulations, Ray!

Ray's book describes some of the first concrete steps taken by astronomers to answer the age-old question, "Are we alone?" Canada enjoys a significant concentration of researchers who study exoplanets, which are planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. Although the study of solar systems other than our own has yet to turn up an alien civilization, recent results indicate that Earth-like planets are probably not extremely rare. They may even be common!

Interested in learning more about the search for exoplanets? Why not pick up a copy of Ray's book, or head to one of the many talks he'll be giving in libraries and other public places around Canada and the US over the next few months?

Neptune Found Not Guilty of Harassment

The prevailing view on the origin of the Cold Classical Kuiper Belt is that Neptune was responsible for harassing, i.e., perturbing, these objects from within the Solar System to their current position at the outer edge of the solar system. New research by a University of Victoria graduate student, Alex Parker, and his supervisor, JJ Kavelaars, at the National Research Council's Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, has shown that is unlikely to have happened.


It turns out that binary Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) are quite common in the Cold Classical Kuiper Belt. We're not quite sure how these binaries form but there is no doubt they are there. Well, the simulations run by Parker and Kavelaars showed conclusively that if Neptune was responsible for moving the objects to their current position, all of the binaries KBOs would have been destroyed in the process. This will cause astronomers to rethink their ideas on how the Kuiper Belt and the rest of our Solar system was formed.

And we are still no closer to understanding how the binary Kuiper Belt objects are formed

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Canadian Astronomer Wins Communication Award

Communicating science to the public is part of the job of being a scientist, especially if that scientist is being funded by taxpayer dollars. Now not all scientists can (or in some cases, should) be talking with the public, but it is important to recognize those who do publicize science, and in particular those who do it well.

Professor Doug Welch of McMaster University has been awarded the 2010 of the McNeil Medal for science communication and promotion by the Royal Society of Canada. This medal is awarded to a person who has demonstrated outstanding ability to promote and communicate science to students and the public within Canada.

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