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Otago Daily Times
7 hours ago
- Science
- Otago Daily Times
Our timeless companion: Michelle Thaller's starry eyed gaze
Astrophysicist Dr Michelle Thaller has spent a lifetime with her head in the stars, she tells Paul Gorman. In a world where terrible things are happening, a reminder we are inconsequential motes on the scale of the universe can be somewhat comforting. ''For you are dust, and to dust you shall return'', the sage words from The Book of Genesis say. The same message is coming from one of Nasa's top scientists, astrophysicist Dr Michelle Thaller, who arrived in Dunedin at Matariki to be the special guest at this week's New Zealand International Science Festival. ''I've been wanting to spend a good amount of time in New Zealand for decades,'' she says. ''When it comes to celebrating Matariki, the idea that we come from the stars and we will go back to the stars, this is literally true.'' Recently retired after 27 years at Nasa, she will be sharing her knowledge of space and the universe at several festival events. Thaller has specialised in the evolution of binary-star systems and is one of the world's top science communicators. She sees the universe as a wondrous place, not something to fear because its stupendous vastness makes it cold and frightening. ''For me it's a bit more of a thrill than a fear. You know, the reason you get on a roller coaster is that sort of pleasant type of fear - you can play with the emotions: 'I'm afraid of this, but it's going to be OK'. ''But the interesting thing for me is that, and I don't know why, but the night sky has always seemed like an old friend, and I've met people all over the world who feel that way.'' While the universe has no emotional state to it, she says astronomy is not the study of ''something far away and dark and uncaring''. It is where we come from. ''There's nothing that makes the atoms of our bodies other than the stars - carbon and calcium and all of that - and the only place you have natural nuclear fusion is inside the core of a star, and you build up the atoms into bigger and bigger atoms. ''Then there's some of the things that our body needs, like iodine. Our bodies would not work without some of those trace elements, and the only time we've ever seen those trace elements made is with pulsars, these neutron stars, in unimaginably huge explosions.'' Thaller's Nasa career began at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California as a senior scientist after graduating with her doctorate from Georgia State University and carrying out postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2009, she moved to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and ultimately became the assistant director of science there. She also did a three-year stint at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC. While at JPL she became interested in science communication and was heavily involved in live Nasa broadcasts and also as a spokesperson on television programmes including How The Universe Works , and on news stories. Her resume lists two Webby awards highlighting Nasa's social media programme among her achievements, as well as this year's accolade of Nasa's Exceptional Achievement Medal, which has previously been won by late astronomer Carl Sagan and the Apollo mission astronauts. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin and also works with the Smithsonian Institution on adult education and travel programmes. Hailing from Waukesha, Wisconsin, Thaller says her love of astronomy began before she can even remember, about the age of 2. ''Mum said it was as soon as I could walk. She was like, 'kid, why do you care about the little lights in the sky?'. It became kind of a running joke. ''I've tried to get her interested in astronomy. She'd ask, 'well what causes the Moon phases', and as a little kid I'd get flashlights out and balls, and she's just like, 'I don't really care, I'm sorry'. ''But I just loved the stars. I was fascinated by them.'' She went to Harvard University to take her undergraduate degree in astrophysics, but found it challenging and initially intimidating. ''I was the first person in my town ever to go to Harvard. I'm from a small, rural community. That was a surprise to everybody, including me, that I got in. Harvard made it possible for me to come, with a combination of loans and scholarships and work-study programmes. ''In high school I was still doing pretty well in science classes, but then when I hit college, I was just struggling the whole time. I felt very lost, very confused. ''The professors meant well, but at that time, back in the late '80s-early '90s, you brought your notebook to class and literally wrote down what the professor was doing on the blackboard. And that was all you did. Then you went home to your dorm room. ''People have different ways of learning. And science in the past was taught, I think, in a very linear, kind of intimidating way. You know, like 'Do you have what it takes to study astrophysics?'. ''You know, if you can study anything, you can study astrophysics. It's like any other topic - I mean, how do you study enough to become a lawyer or a doctor?'' Through ''pure pig-headedness'' she stuck it out. ''I just loved astronomy, so I stayed there and suffered through it. About midway through my college career, I started to do research projects with the professors as part of my coursework and then things just lit up, because it was the practical application of these things. ''Say we want to observe these monsters called neutron stars. What sort of data do we need to take? How do we analyse the data? All of a sudden, it's your own exploration and your own questions, and working with other people.'' That carried on when she worked on her doctorate. ''A lot of people are worried that if they want to do a doctorate they have to come up with a brilliant idea all on their own. But no, you start working with a team of astronomers; you usually have one adviser, that's a professor, and they get you started on something. ''They might say, 'hey, look at this data that I have. Why don't you just start with that, and we'll talk about what you're seeing', and so you became part of a wonderful team.'' Had she ever wanted to be an astronaut? ''When I was young, yes. I went to space camp, which was run by the US Space and Rocket Centre, and I loved it. I loved astronaut training, and I had pictures of astronauts on my wall as a kid. ''And I got interested in the science behind the stars a little bit more than the actual going-to-space part of it. But I have a lot of astronaut friends, and some of the astronauts hopefully on the next Artemis missions, they're friends of mine. ''To put it kind of honestly, you know, as I got into college and grad school, I developed a fear of flying. So, you know, probably not the best thing for an astronaut to be afraid of. ''I still fly everywhere, I fly all over the world, but I'm getting better, but I'm not real comfortable in a plane. It gives me fear, especially turbulence where we bounce around. I understand everything about it, I mean turbulence isn't dangerous, but I'm getting much more calmed down about it.'' Thaller carried out much of her doctoral research on massive binary stars at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia. ''These stars that are orbiting each other are sometimes 30 to 50 times the mass of the Sun. There's more of them in the southern sky than there are in the northern sky, because the centre of the galaxy appears higher in the sky in the southern sky than it does in the north, so there are actually more stars in the southern sky. ''These stars are not necessarily physically all that much bigger than the Sun, but the big thing is their mass. They have a very strong wind of particles coming off them, like winds of hot hydrogen gas, so they actually slam together a lot of molecules. ''The stars produce all of the atoms that we know but then, in these shock waves, in the winds of stars, you can get things like water molecules produced. In one of the systems I was studying, the shock wave of the winds between the stars produced enough water to fill Earth's oceans 60 times a day. ''It's making very hot, very gaseous, water, very diffuse gas, and that gets fed into the dust between the stars as we travel around the galaxy at about 700,000kmh. In the course of Earth's history, we've been around the whole galaxy about 20 times.'' Astronomers now have a sample of Asteroid Bennu, which shows how water reacted with the minerals, she says. ''It must have been part of a dwarf planet that got broken up at some point. But there was liquid water around, dissolving the minerals, which is amazing.'' Pulsars, the dead cores of stars that spin fast and emit regular bursts of electromagnetic radiation, also fascinate Thaller. ''There are some that spin a couple of hundred times a second. These are only about 30km across but with the mass of twice the Sun. That actually turns out to be twice the density of an atomic nucleus - it's the densest matter that we know of. So, pulsars are incredible monsters. ''There was an event in 2008 where there was a burst of high-energy radiation and a noticeable amount of atmosphere got blown up into space. And our magnetic field was ringing like a bell. And we were like, 'OK, what just happened?'. ''We traced it back to a little glitch - one of the pulsars had a tiny, tiny little change in the rate it was rotating. That pulsar was 50,000 light years away - a light year being about 10 trillion kilometres. We think there was a tiny shift in the crust of the pulsar, maybe about 1cm or less, and in a millisecond that produced more energy than the Sun puts out in a quarter billion years. ''We got a glancing blow of high-energy radiation from that thing. Some people wonder if such events might actually limit the lifetimes of civilisations. I mean, there are thousands, millions of pulsars all around us. ''One little bad day on a pulsar, and it takes out planets for light years.'' That potential threat to our existence is larger than from an asteroid, she says. ''The huge asteroid that took out the dinosaurs, it may have caused a huge shift in our climate but life survived that. But if you get a direct hit by one of these gamma-ray bursts, it can just strafe the atmosphere off.'' We're back to the returning-to-the-stars narrative. On a brighter note, Thaller says she has had a great visit so far. Her Ōtepoti experience kicked off with a train trip through the Taieri Gorge on a Stargazer journey operated by Dunedin Railways, Tūhura Otago Museum and the Dunedin Astronomical Society. The events allow passengers to alight at Hindon and view the universe through up-to-date telescopes in a streetlight-free area. ''I've never done anything like it,'' she says. ''This was such a unique astronomy experience. A lovely historic train took off from the station, we were served a good meal on board, and in about an hour we got to a site that had telescopes and other activities set up. The young people running the show were just wonderful - full of knowledge and energy. ''We lucked out - there were patchy clouds around, but the holes were big enough to get good views of star clusters. Mulled wine and hot chocolate on the way back, and I answered astronomy questions over the train intercom.'' For an astronomer, that sounds like a heavenly cocktail. The festival Expect the usual eclectic mixture of workshops, talks, tours and shows over the week, as more than 100 organised events are held across Dunedin until the festival closes next Sunday. A random dive into the festival programme reveals events including: ''An Introvert's Guide to Extroverts'', ''A Flying Photon'', ''Atomically Correct'' (a quantum comedy), ''Coastal Parasites: The good, the bad and the ugly'', ''Death in the Distillery: A Forensic Mystery'', ''Exploring Dunedin's Extinct Volcano'', ''Heart Science for Kids'', ''Jean Stevens and 'Blooming Impossible', ''Living Alongside Pakake'', ''The Science Behind Everyday Appliances'', ''Te Tahu-Nui-ā-Rangi (Aurora) clay tile making'', and ''Fight Like a Physicist''. • Check out the full listings at
Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Science
- Los Angeles Times
Orange County science reading challenge winners enjoy special JPL visit
Delaney Martinez was like a kid in a candy store. In reality, she was a kid in a laboratory when she and 11 other Orange County students took a special VIP tour of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge on June 17. Delaney, who makes science videos on her YouTube channel 'Science With Dee' and has more than 175,000 followers, certainly felt right at home. 'It was so much fun,' the 13-year-old said. 'My favorite part was definitely seeing all of the models of the Mars Rovers. Those were super-cool, because they had the very first model to the newest one. It was really cool seeing the comparison.' The students all earned the trip based on their work in the 2024 Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) Race to Space Reading Challenge. Founder Pat Burns said she started the Race to Space Reading Challenge in 2021 after the Orange County Children's Book Festival, which she co-founded, had to go virtual the previous year due to the coronavirus pandemic. 'I missed having the kids really engaged,' Burns said. 'So I decided to not do a virtual book festival in 2021. I wanted to do a reading challenge, but wanted to be able to encourage STEM. To my surprise, we had more than 1,600 kids register and we had more than 500 finish it.' She retired from running the children's book festival following the 2022 edition to devote her time to the reading challenge. In the reading challenge's three years, more than 4,000 total students have participated. Divided by age group into four levels, the students chart their STEM book-reading progress on an online platform called Beanstack. Anything they read past the requirements earns them bonus tickets, which they can enter to win things like Zoom calls with astronauts, the trip to JPL, laptop computers, sports tickets or book bundles from publishers. Ryan Melendez, an incoming seventh grader at the Pegasus School in Huntington Beach, said his teacher Jaime Kunze-Thibeau recommended the program to him. The trip to JPL was one of the coolest things he did all year, he said. 'My favorite part would be the mission control center,' Ryan said. 'There were a bunch of people on computers there. I thought it was pretty cool. That would be a fun job to do.' After perusing the lab with two scientist tour guides, the students got to go to the California Institute of Technology for a special buffet lunch at the Athenaeum, a private club on the Pasadena school's campus. 'It's just stunning inside,' Burns said of the Athenaeum, which opened in 1930 with a formal dinner to celebrate Albert Einstein's first visit to Caltech. 'The architecture, the detailed woodwork, the white tablecloths, the waiters. The kids, about half of them, liked it as much as they liked the tour, which shocked me. They really appreciated and knew they were someplace special.' Julia Rundzio, an incoming sixth-grade student at Sequoia Elementary School in Westminster, also entered several tickets into the drawing and was selected for the JPL trip. For the next S.T.E.A.M. Race to Space Reading Challenge, she might help promote the program within her school, said Julia's father, Remi Rundzio. 'It's an amazing program,' Julia said. 'It motivates kids to read books that are not just fiction, but also have science elements and help educate about different things that are going on around us.' Other county students who went on the JPL trip included Emma Zirney and Kenzie Murdie of Lake Forest, Andrew Lee Golden of Garden Grove, Harry Lee of Fullerton, Madelyn Perez of Mission Viejo, Matthew Jay of Irvine, Rinal Jamal of Yorba Linda, Sahas Yalamanchili of Irvine and Sai Sitaraman of Fullerton. The students ranged from elementary age to high school. Burns said the program has relied on generous donations for the bonus opportunities, as well as funding from grants. This is the first year the students have been able to tour JPL due to previous COVID protocols. The 2025 edition of the S.T.E.A.M. Race to Space Reading Challenge blasts off Oct. 3, with registration starting Sept. 19. Burns said she's looking to connect with Rocket Lab to organize a bonus tour, or Vast, another Long Beach-based company that is developing artificial gravity space stations.
Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Reliance Industries' Mukesh Ambani says Jio's 5G network uses 80% indigenous technology
NEW DELHI: Reliance Industries ' Chairman Mukesh Ambani said Reliance Jio 's fifth-generation ( 5G ) network comprises 80% indigenously developed stack, with European gear makers Ericsson and Nokia supplying the balance. 'In 2021, we launched 5G. We built everything ourselves, end to end, the core, the hardware, the software, every single piece. We used Ericsson and Nokia to help us on 20%, just to make sure that the 80% that we put in was good,' Ambani told New York-based consultancy firm McKinsey in an interview. Reliance is pivoting to become a 'deep-technology and advanced manufacturing company'.Ambani said. Jio Platforms (JPL) has developed 5G radio, core, OSS/BSS, small and pico cells, and other software solutions, as part of its homegrown stack. Reliance Jio, the largest telecom service provider in the country with nearly 500 million subscribers, makes up the bulk of JPL's operations. Established in October 2019, JPL also houses the digital properties of the group. The top telco has its intellectual property rights (IPR) in 5G radios, 5G Core, AI/ML platforms, Cloud orchestration, and Cloud infrastructure deployment, as well as, in Cloud-native probing solutions for radio and Core networks, ETTelecom reported in September last year . JPL is among the few Indian firms, including a consortium comprising Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Tejas Networks and the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT), that have their stack. Jio, which had deployed Samsung's equipment for its commercial foray into the fourth-generation (4G) services, widened its vendor base by awarding multi-year 5G radio access network (RAN) deals to both Nokia and Ericsson in 2022. Today, Jio has a 5G subscriber base of 191 million, the largest outside China. 45% of its total wireless traffic is on 5G networks nationwide, a proportion that is only growing on the back of an increase in data consumption. Ambani, the chief of India's most valuable company with a market capitalisation of over ₹15.5 lakh crore, acknowledged that Reliance had taken its biggest risk with Jio's launch in 2016. 'We have always taken big risks because, for us, scale is important. The biggest risk we have taken so far was Jio. At the time, it was our own money that we were investing, and l was the majority shareholder,' he said, adding that the worst-case scenario was that Jio might not work out financially as analysts doubted if India was ready for 'the most advanced digital technology '. 'What has also happened is that, as we chase the opportunities of technology into the future, some of these opportunities become bigger than our existing opportunities. And we cannot leave them alone,' Ambani said. Jio's foray into the telecom business with freebies and affordable mobile packs had severely disrupted the market, which was led by Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea back then, and the ripple effects are prevalent even today.
9 News
4 days ago
- Science
- 9 News
Celestial spectacle set to light up the sky this week
Early risers have the chance to see a celestial spectacle on Friday morning. The moon is set to meet up and appear together with the rarely visible Mercury in the pre-dawn sky. Here's what you need to know ahead of the twilight pairing. Early risers will be treated to a celestial spectacle on Friday as the moon meets up with the rarely visible Mercury. (NASA/JPL/USGS) How to see the moon and Mercury in Australia Swinburne University of Technology astrophysicist Dr Kirsten Banks said the moon and Mercury will appear together on the morning of June 27. "Look east just before sunrise, around 6am local time," Banks said. "You'll spot a slim crescent moon with Mercury shining just below it. "They'll be only about three moon-widths apart, which is close enough to fit in the same binocular view." READ MORE: Astronomy show accidentally reveals unseen structure in our solar system Astronaut's groundbreaking image from space among award-winning Milky Way shots View Gallery Why is the mercury rarely visible? Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system and is only slightly larger than the moon. The planet is usually visible at certain times of the year around sunrise or sunset as it is the closest planet to the sun. "Mercury is often tricky to spot, so this is a great opportunity to catch it with the moon's help," Banks said. "Just make sure you've got a clear view of the eastern horizon." Mercury is the fastest planet in the solar system, moving around the sun every 88 days.
Yahoo
21-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Turns out supermassive black holes are way more common than we thought
If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, BGR may receive an affiliate commission. Supermassive black holes are some of the densest objects found within our universe. These cosmic objects are so heavy that they often weigh billions of times more than our sun, and they're so dense, not even light can escape their grasp. For the most part, we've believed these massive beasts were only found at the center of galaxies. However, new research suggests they might be far more common than we thought. The new study, which is published in The Astrophysical Journal, used data from NASA's InfraRed Astronomy Satellite and the NuSTAR X-ray telescope, which is operated by NASA/JPL. By looking at data from both the infrared and x-ray spectrums, they were able to determine that several of these cosmic objects managed to slip past earlier observations. Today's Top Deals Best deals: Tech, laptops, TVs, and more sales Best Ring Video Doorbell deals Memorial Day security camera deals: Reolink's unbeatable sale has prices from $29.98 Supermassive black holes should be pretty hard to miss. Just like Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is. While you can't expect see them by going outside and looking up from your backyard, their enormous mass causes ripples and distortions in space, which isn't hard to spot when viewing the universe through a powerful telescope. Despite the immense pull these objects have on the universe, it's still possible to miss them due to unexpected readings or even things like gravitational lensing from other galaxies. And since we still don't know how black holes evolve, there's only so much we can do to spot them. Not to mention there are a ton of less active, silent black holes out there that aren't siphoning off matter and light anymore. So, how exactly did the researchers spot new black holes? Well, according to the findings, they looked at how gas and dust emit light after being heated. From there, they were able to spot several new supermassive black holes hidden in the cosmos. We know that sometimes these cosmic objects can break free of their galaxies, leading to rogue black holes, so it's not too surprising that there are more of them than we previously expected. This is all part of a growing attempt to understand more about how dust interacts within the universe as a whole, and what's going on behind it. While there are likely still thousands (if not millions) of black holes we have yet to discover, this new research at least tells us it is worth looking harder. More Top Deals Amazon gift card deals, offers & coupons 2025: Get $2,000+ free See the
