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Register a new userGravitational-wave Astronomy: Opening a New Window on the Universe for Students, Educators and the Public
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The nascent field of gravitational-wave astronomy offers many opportunities for effective and inspirational astronomy outreach. Gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time predicted by Einsteins theory of General Relativity, are produced by some of the most energetic and dramatic phenomena in the cosmos, including black holes, neutron stars and supernovae. The detection of gravitational waves will help to address a number of fundamental questions in physics, from the evolution of stars and galaxies to the origin of dark energy and the nature of space-time itself. Moreover, the cutting-edge technology developed to search for gravitational waves is pushing back the frontiers of many fields, from lasers and materials science to high performance computing, and thus provides a powerful showcase for the attractions and challenges of a career in science and engineering. For several years a worldwide network of ground-based laser interferometric gravitational-wave detectors has been fully operational, including the two LIGO detectors in the United States. These detectors are already among the most sensitive scientific instruments on the planet and in the next few years their sensitivity will achieve further significant improvement. Those developments promise to open an exciting new window on the Universe, heralding the arrival of gravitational-wave astronomy as a revolutionary, new observational field. In this paper we describe the extensive program of public outreach activities already undertaken by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, and a number of special events which we are planning for IYA2009.
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LOFAR, the Low Frequency Array, is a next-generation radio telescope that is being built in Northern Europe and expected to be fully operational at the end of this decade. It will operate at frequencies from 15 to 240 MHz (corresponding to wavelengths of 20 to 1.2 m). Its superb sensitivity, high angular resolution, large field of view and flexible spectroscopic capabilities will represent a dramatic improvement over previous facilities at these wavelengths. As such, LOFAR will carry out a broad range of fundamental astrophysical studies. The design of LOFAR has been driven by four fundamental astrophysical applications: (i) The Epoch of Reionisation, (ii) Extragalactic Surveys and their exploitation to study the formation and evolution of clusters, galaxies and black holes, (iii) Transient Sources and their association with high energy objects such as gamma ray bursts, and (iv) Cosmic Ray showers and their exploitation to study the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. In this conference the foreseen LOFAR work on the epoch of reionisation has been covered by de Bruyn and on cosmic ray showers by Falcke. During this contribution we will first present the LOFAR project with an emphasis on the challenges faced when carrying out sensitive imaging at low radio frequencies. Subsequently, we will discuss LOFARs capabilities to survey the low-frequency radio sky. Main aims for the planned surveys are studies of z>6 radio galaxies, diffuse emission associated with distant clusters and starbursting galaxies at z>2.
We designed a Physics Teaching Lab experience for blind students to measure the wavelength of standing waves on a string. Our adaptation consisted of modifying the determination of the wavelength of the standing wave, which is usually done by visual inspection of the nodes and antinodes, using the sound volume generated by a guitar pickup at different points along the string. This allows one of the blind students at our University to participate simultaneously as their classmates in the laboratory session corresponding to the wave unit of a standard engineering course.
The large-scale surveys such as PTF, CRTS and Pan-STARRS-1 that have emerged within the past 5 years or so employ digital databases and modern analysis tools to accentuate research into Time Domain Astronomy (TDA). Preparations are underway for LSST which, in another 6 years, will usher in the second decade of modern TDA. By that time the Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH) project will have made available to the community the full sky Historical TDA database and digitized images for a century (1890--1990) of coverage. We describe the current DASCH development and some initial results, and outline plans for the production scanning phase and data distribution which is to begin in 2012. That will open a 100-year window into temporal astrophysics, revealing rare transients and (especially) astrophysical phenomena that vary on time-scales of a decade. It will also provide context and archival comparisons for the deeper modern surveys
This article reports on a student summer project performed in 2006 at the University of Frankfurt. It is addressed to undergraduate students familiar with the basic principles of relativistic quantum mechanics and general relativity. The aim of the project was to study the Dirac equation in curved space time. To obtain the general relativistic Dirac equation we use the formulation of gravity as a gauge theory in the first part. After these general considerations we restrict the further discussion to the special case of the Schwarzschild metric. This setting corresponds to the hydrogen atom, with the electromagnetic field replaced by gravity. Although there is a singularity at the event horizon it turns out that a regular solution of the time independent Dirac equation exists. Finally the Dirac equation is solved numerically using suitable boundary conditions.
The detection and study of extrasolar planets is an exciting and thriving field in modern astrophysics, and an increasingly popular topic in introductory astronomy courses. One detection method relies on searching for stars whose light has been gravitationally microlensed by an extrasolar planet. In order to facilitate instructors abilities to bring this interesting mix of general relativity and extrasolar planet detection into the introductory astronomy classroom, we have developed a new Lecture-Tutorial, Detecting Exoplanets with Gravitational Microlensing. In this paper, we describe how this new Lecture-Tutorials representations of astrophysical phenomena, which we selected and created based on theoretically motivated considerations of their pedagogical affordances, are used to help introductory astronomy students develop more expert-like reasoning abilities.
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