4.4 A&G • August 2012 • Vol. 53

‘A&G’ for the IAU in Beijing

Sue Bowler, Editor

Special iSSue The General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union is

something of a showcase for astronomy in general, and for astronomy in the host country in particular. This year it takes place in China, bringing more than 4000 astronomers from across the world to Beijing. This is a big deal – for much of the 20th century, political concerns on both sides have limited links between scientists in China and elsewhere. The 2012 IAU GA is a sign of how much this has changed. Chinese researchers are becoming part of the international community and China is applying its considerable organizational and economic might to establishing an astronomical infrastructure – which may include a giant telescope.

This is a Special Issue of A&G to mark the occasion of the GA in Beijing. Some of the articles in this issue of A&G focus on the changing face of astronomy in China, but others represent business as usual for the Society. You can read about David Southwood’s career so far and his aspirations for his Presidency of the RAS, and there is a report from one of our Specialist Discussion Meetings asking if the Earth is special, together with our usual round-up of news, book reviews and research review articles, here addressing cosmological modelling, massive stars and, in our annual Presidential Address, a look at future giant telescopes. Whether you are a Fellow of the RAS, or you found this issue in your IAU delegate pack in Beijing, or you have downloaded it as an app on your tablet, I hope that you enjoy reading A&G.

Do get in touch to let me know what you think, or if there’s anything you would like to see in a future issue, or even if there’s an article you want to write.s.bowler@leeds.ac.uk

editorial

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UKIRT, JCMT and ING funding is extended, but not for longThe UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council has agreed to extend the funding available for the UK Infrared Telescope and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, both based in Hawaii, and the Isaac Newton Group of instruments in the Canaries. The JCMT will be supported until the end of September 2014, in order to complete the science programme for SCUBA-2. UKIRT will be sup-ported until September 2013, a year after its current programme of research is completed. STFC support for the ING – essentially the Wil-liam Herschel Telescope – will be extended initially until March 2015, in the hope of negotiating continuing

access with Spain. While these extensions to funding

do achieve one important goal – con-tinued access to northern hemisphere skies for UK astronomers – the loss of JCMT and UKIRT will limit UK research, as well as result in the loss of around 40 jobs. While UK astronomers have access to world-class instruments through UK sup-port for the the European Southern Observatory, world-leading research needs access to the whole of the sky, with optical instruments such as the WHT complementing observations at other wavelengths, such as the pan-European LOFAR radio array.

Such cuts, a consequence of a decrease in government spending

on science, also risk dmaaging our research competitiveness. “At the moment UK astronomers and space scientists are among the most pro-ductive in the world and are sec-ond only to the United States in the number of citations of our scientific papers,” said Prof. David South-wood, President of the RAS.

“This and the quality of our facili-ties have made the UK an attrac-tive destination for researchers from across the globe. Astronomy remains a core inspiration for bring-ing students into science and engi-neering, recognized as being of key importance for long-term economic growth.”http://bit.ly/L4R4Uo

ESO approves construction of E-ELTOn 11 June, the Council of the European Southern Observatory approved the construction of the European Extremely Large Tel-escope, which will be the biggest optical/infrared telescope in the world.The E-ELT is a 39.3 m diameter tel-escope that will collect at least 12 times more light than the current largest optical telescopes. Con-struction will begin as soon as ESO member states have pledged 90% of the €1083m cost; four members – Belgium, Finland, Italy and the UK – approved the project subject to government approval before the next meeting of ESO Council. Including these votes, 10 member states approved the project and the remaining four plan to join in future.

Industrial contracts and major funding commitments will need to be made in the next year in order to have the E-ELT up and running in the early years of the next decade. Some money is already committed, for example for preparatory work on the approach road to Cerro Arma-zones in Chile.

The UK has leading roles in the project. The UK Astronomy Tech-nology Centre in Edinburgh is coordinating the UK contributions, in collaboration with industry and university partners, which include a lead role on one of two “first light” instruments, HARMONI, and sig-nificant input to the development of five other instruments. This in turn will grant astronomers access to some of the earliest observations carried out on the giant telescope.

But involvement with the E-ELT will also boost UK business. Already

around €10m has been won by the UK for work in the pre-construction phase. Once construction starts, industrial contracts will be open to competitive tender within member states, to at least a value of €800m. UK industry is in a strong position to be successful in bidding against this, especially in the areas of optics manufacture, detectors, software and structural engineering.

“Major UK involvement in world-leading astronomical projects is the primary reason the UK joined the European Southern Observatory,” said Prof. Gerry Gilmore from

Cambridge University, who was the UK Council member when the UK joined ESO and Chair of the E-ELT Design Study in its early stages. “UK technology and industry will benefit enormously, and British scientists will be able to lead in the next stages of mankind’s discovery of the nature of time, matter, existence, the origin and far future of the universe, and the expected discovery of life far out-side our own solar system. The intel-lectual opportunities are immense, the challenges vast, the potential almost unlimited.” http://www.eelt.org.uk

Reflected laser light from a lipstick-sized robot developed to position mirrors in instruments for giant telescopes, in the winning entry for the STFC Photowalk competition, taken by Stuart McIntyre at the UK ATC. (S McIntyre/STFC)

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ALMA examines Centaurus AThis is what ALMA can show of the dusty centre of radio galaxy Centaurus A. ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimetre Array, is still under construction and is in its early science phase of observations, but is already the most powerful telescope of its kind. Cen A is the closest and most powerful radio galaxy in our sky, powered by a supermassive black hole with a mass about 100 million times that of the Sun at its centre. But the central regions of this massive elliptical galaxy are also home to a lot of gas and dust, which has obscured attempts to explore why it is such a powerful radio source using visible light. This image combines infrared imagery with 1.3 mm data from ALMA arising from carbon monoxide molecules. This radiation is shown in yellow where there is no relative motion between the source gas and us; CO moving towards us is shown in green and that away from us in orange. The gas is orbiting around the galaxy, aligned with a ring of stars and clusters visible in the near-infrared background image. These are the remains of a spiral galaxy that collided with the giant elliptical galaxy and produced much of the gas and dust. (ALMA [ESO/NAOJ/NRAO], ESO/Y Beletsky)http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1222

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EUCLID moves closer to launch ESA’s dark energy and dark mat-ter mission, EUCLID, has received approval from the Science Pro-gramme Committee to move into the full contruction phase, ahead of launch in 2020.This formal adoption of the mission means that development of its two instruments – a visible-wavelength camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer – can proceed. Work will also go ahead on development of the large distributed processing sys-tem needed to analyse mission data.

EUCLID is designed to measure the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, in order to understand the role of dark energy and dark matter. The space telescope will use its 1.2 m telescope to map the 3D distribution

of up to two billion galaxies and dark matter associated with them, collecting data from the past 10 bil-lion light-years, enabling mission scientists to plot the evolution of the structure of the universe over three-quarters of its history.

EUCLID and Solar Orbiter were selected in October 2011 as the first medium-class missions of the Cosmic Vision 2015–25 plan. In the coming months, industry will be asked to bid to supply spacecraft hardware, such as the telescope, power systems, atti-tude and orbit controls, and commu-nications systems. Astrium UK was awarded the €300m contract to build Solar Orbiter in April this year; its launch is planned for 2017. http://www.esa.int

WMAP team wins Gruber PrizeCharles Bennett (right) and the team behind the Wilkinson Micro-wave Anisotropy Probe received the 2012 Gruber Prize, in recogni-tion of the precision of their results that have turned an “appealing scenario into precise science”.Bennett, Professor of Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, will receive a gold medal at the Inter-national Astronomical Union Meet-ing in Beijing this month. He and the WMAP team will also be awarded the prize fund of $500 000.

The award recognizes a large team effort, designing the experiment and getting WMAP into space, as part of the project to pin down variations in the cosmic microwave background, which it did with such precision that

WMAP’s version of the universe is now commonly known as the Stand-ard Cosmological Model. “There are so many heroes who stand up at just the right time and make something happen,” said Bennett, “and they all deserve credit for that.”http://www.gruberprizes.org

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Sentinel in businessThe B612 Foundation plans to launch the first privately funded deep-space mission: an infrared space telescope to map near-Earth asteroids. Sentinel is intended to track half a million NEAs in its five-year lifetime, producing a database for hazard assessment and as a guide to further exploration.These small solar system bodies potentially have both scientific and economic value. The Foundation is working with the California Academy of Sciences and the Planetary Society, and Ball Aerospace will build the spacecraft. The data collected – maps of half the night sky every 26 days – will be disseminated through NASA’s Minor Planet Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will carry out a comprehensive hazard analysis.http://b612foundation.org

MIRI ready for WebbThe first instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI) was ESA’s contribution to the JWST, developed by a consortium of 10 European institutions and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and assembled at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. MIRI’s sensitive detectors will allow it to observe light, cool stars in very distant galaxies; unveil newly forming stars within our Milky Way; find signatures of the formation of and take imagery and spectroscopy of planets, comets and the outermost bits of debris in our solar system.http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/miri.html

Impossible binariesData from the UK Infrared Telescope have revealed four pairs of stars that orbit each other in less than four hours. Such close pairs were thought to be impossible, until a survey with UKIRT’s Wide-Field Camera found these red-dwarf pairs. Their existence poses problems for the formation and evolution of binaries; if each pair had formed this close together, the two stars would have merged, so it is thought that their orbits must have shrunk. Bas Nefs of Leiden Observatory was lead author of the publication in Monthly Notices of the RAS.http://arxiv.org/abs/1206.1200

NewS iN Brief Martian gravity maps track volcanic historySubtle variations in the trajectory of ESA’s Mars Express orbiter have been used to map variations in the gravitational pull of the planet that can be related to the shape and density of the rocks below – giv-ing researchers the first glimpse of the internal geology of another planet.Mars Express was tracked from Earth for six years to produce the gravity data. Its eccentric orbit over the poles and approaching to within 270 km of the surface helped to pro-vide snapshots of gravity data near specific surface features, such as the volcanoes of the Tharsis bulge. These close-ups were given context by com-bining Mars Express observations with global data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The data show that these martian volcanoes are built from rocks with the density of basalt, a result consist-ent with the composition of martian meteorites and higher-than-average crustal rock density. But the gravity maps also show that the density of the lava changed during eruptions and differs from volcano to volcano.

The new data also reveal that the three Tharsis Montes volcanoes started life with a lighter andesitic lava that can form in the presence of water, which was overlaid with heavier basaltic lava that makes up the visible surface. This implies that the three Tharsis volcanoes formed in a sequence, with Arsia Mons first and Ascraeus Mons last, like lines of volcanoes above a hot spot on Earth, such as the Hawaiian island chain. Mars has no plate tectonics, suggest-ing that the source of magma moved.

Data from the Mars Express radio science experiment also allow researchers to map the thickness of the martian lithosphere – the outer rigid layer of the planet. It seems that Olympus Mons has a lower density lithospheric root than the three Tharsis volcanoes, which may indi-cate that it formed at a time when the lithosphere was stronger and better

able to support such a huge volcanic edifice; the Tharsis volcanoes, it is implied, partically sank into a softer lithosphere as a consequence of spa-tial variation in heat flow from the mantle, which changes its rigidity.

These data are published in Journal of Geophysical Research by Beuthe et al. (doi:10.1029/2011JE003976).http://bit.ly/JuEcVA

New Zealand’s dark sky reserveOver 4000 km2 of New Zealand’s South Island are now an Inter-national Dark Sky Reserve – the fourth in the world, and the largest. The Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve comprises the Aoraki/Mt Cook National Park and the Mackenzie Basin. International Dark-Sky Association Executive Director Bob Parks said: “The new reserve is coming in at a gold level status. That means the skies there are almost totally free from light pollu-tion. To put it simply, it is one of the best stargazing sites on Earth.”

The night sky has long been impor-tant in the area. The Maori used the night sky not only to navigate to the island but also as a part of their cul-ture and daily lives. http://www.darksky.org/IDSPlaces

Shaded relief image of Tharsis Montes and Olympus Mons derived from Mars Orbiter Altimeter data which flew on board NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor. New data (M Beuthe et al. 2012) suggest that Tharsis Montes formed one by one, starting with Arsia Mons, possibly by the movement of a single mantle plume moving under the surface. (NASA)

Congratulations! It’s a boson!As A&G went to press, CERN announced that results from the Large Hadron Collider CMS and ATLAS experiments probably show the Higgs boson; researchers have found a new particle in the mass region around 125–126 GeV. “The results are preliminary but the 5s signal at around 125 GeV is dra-matic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found,” said CMS representative Joe Incandela.

CERN Director General Rolf Heuer was less cautious: “The dis-covery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”

The discovery was welcomed in the

UK. Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts said: “The UK has made an enormous contribu-tion over the last 20 years supporting the search for the Higgs boson. Our researchers, universities and industry partners have been instrumental in making the Large Hadron Collider such a success.”

Even the Prime Minister was impressed: “All of those involved in this important discovery deserve huge acclaim, in particular the many UK scientists, researchers and busi-nesses that have helped make the Large Hadron Collider such a tre-mendous success. And let’s not forget that this discovery started right here in Britain. The man behind the the-ory, Peter Higgs, was born and bred in Newcastle and did his ground-breaking work in Edinburgh.”http://public.web.cern.ch

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SCUBA-2 shows its mettleThis is a 450 µm image of a 15 arcminute-diameter region within the COSMOS field taken with the new SCUBA-2 submillimetre camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), Hawaii. These are the deepest panoramic observations ever obtained at 450 µm – from a ground-based telescope – and the combination of the impressive sensitivity of SCUBA-2 and the fine resolution provided by the large aperture of the JCMT means that they reach below the detection limit of similar observations from ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory. The detailed panels show an enlarged region of the field and compare this to a “true-colour” image constructed from the recent Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 optical and near-infrared observations of this field from the CANDELS project. This demonstrates that SCUBA-2 450 µm sources exhibit a wide variety of optical/near-infrared properties and include some sources which are undetected even in this extremely deep optical/near-infrared imaging. These are likely to be the highest redshift and dustiest submillimetre sources. These data were taken as part of the SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey. (Dr J E Geach [McGill] and the tri-national S2CLS Consortium)

Exoplanet hit by stellar flare – loses atmosphereA dramatic demonstration of the effects of a flare from a star on the atmosphere of a closely orbiting gas giant exoplanet has come from combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’a Swift gamma-ray observatory. The exoplanet is HD 189733b, a gas giant like Jupiter, but about 14% larger and more massive. The planet circles its star, HD 189733A at a dis-tance of only 5 million km and com-pletes an orbit every 2.2 days. HST data had previously shown that the exoplanet was losing significant amounts of hydrogen from its upper atmosphere – it was called an “evap-orating” exoplanet.

A team led by Alain Lecavelier des Etangs at the Paris Institute of Astro-physics (IAP), part of the French National Scientific Research Center located at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, took a closer look. Observations using the HST’s Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) dur-ing a transit in April 2010 revealed no trace of the planet’s atmosphere, but follow-up STIS observations in

September 2011 showed a surpris-ing reversal, with striking evidence that a plume of gas was streaming away from the exoplanet. At least 1000 tonnes of gas was leaving the planet’s atmosphere every second, with hydrogen atoms racing away at speeds more that 500 000 km/hour.

Because X-rays and extreme ultra-violet starlight heat the planet’s atmosphere and are likely to drive its escape, the team also monitored the star with the X-ray Telescope on Swift. On 7 September 2011, just eight hours before Hubble was sched-

uled to observe the transit, Swift saw a powerful flare. The star brightened by 3.6 times in X-rays, a spike that came on top of normal emission levels already greater than those of the Sun.

“The planet’s close proximity to the star means it was struck by a blast of X-rays tens of thousands of times stronger than the Earth suffers even during an X-class solar flare, the strongest category,” said co-author Peter Wheatley, a physicist at the University of Warwick in England.http://www.nasa.gov/swifthttp://www.nasa.gov/hubble

Supercomputing to serve weather forecasting The Science and Technology Facili-ties Council (STFC), the Met Office and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) are together designing and building a next-generation weather forecast-ing model that will exploit ultra-fast supercomputers and boost the effectiveness of forecasts. The goal is to save money – and lives.The new model will benefit from using exascale supercomputers, thousands of times faster than today’s systems. It will use the High Performance Supercomputing facil-ity at STFC’s Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire. It is anticipated that the new code will, in time, replace the dynamical core of the Met Office’s Unified Model (UM), the principal UK tool for weather and climate prediction, also used by national weather services around the world.

Prof. Stephen Mobbs, Director of NERC’s National Centre for Atmo-spheric Science, said: “Tomorrow’s exascale computers represent a huge opportunity and a huge challenge for the science of weather forecast-ing. The opportunity to produce forecast detail down to the scales which affect specific human activi-ties are beckoning. At the same time, the computer software challenges of effectively using millions of proces-sors open up new areas of computer science.”

Associate Director of STFC’s Com-putational Science and Engineering Department Dr Mike Ashworth said: “There are many challenges to over-come, the main issue being that the models used to simulate the atmo-sphere today would be unable to take advantage of the processing power of the ultra-fast computers avail-able within the next few years. We are working together to design and develop a next-generation computer program that will do the key job of simulating the winds, temperature and pressure. This, when combined with other processes such as cloud formation, will allow us to simulate the changing weather conditions.”http://bit.ly/MxGKFW

South Pole detectors will predict solar proton eventsEnergetic particles from the Sun are a known hazard to astronauts and passengers and crew of high-altitude aircraft on polar flight-paths. Now researchers plan to predict such events using neutron detectors at Earth’s South Pole. Solar proton events are one type of

space weather, fluctuations in the Sun’s output that affect people and technology on and around Earth. Mitigating the effects of space weather requires forecasting, which has proved difficult. Now a team of South Korean and US researchers has found that measuring the energy

spectrum of GeV neutrons at the South Pole gives a good guide to the slower and damaging MeV protons that follow. They tested their system on 12 solar events in the past, and found a good agreement with satel-lite data. The method gives a typical warning time of 166 minutes.

S Y Oh of Dept of Astronomy and Space Science, Chungnam National University, South Korea and of Bar-tol Research Institute, Dept of Phys-ics and Astronomy, University of Delaware and co-workers published their method in Space Weather.http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2012SW000795

Artist’s impression of a flare driving off the atmosphere. (NASA/ESA/HST)