NASA Spitzer Space Telescope Spitzer Team Blog - NASA Spitzer Space Telescope

December craziness

Here in LA, the entertainment portion of the community (those in "the industry") have a crazy December, what with all the award nominations being released. As if the looming regular end-of-year holidays weren't crazy enough, people can go a little nutty about the awards.  But within the astronomy community, December is nutty for a different reason.

Every year, the American Astronomical Society, the professional society for astronomers, holds two week-long meetings -- one in early January and one in late May or early June.  The meetings are held in different places around the country. The one in early January is historically better attended, and those meetings that are held in cities where there are a lot of astronomers within a reasonable radius are really well attended.  The one coming up in January 2010 is going to be held in Washington, D.C., and there are a lot of astronomers in the greater DC area -- there are even a lot as far away as Boston.  So it's gonna be big... really big.  So far there are something like 3500 astronomers registered in advance, with many more expected to walk up and register.

Think about that.  There are only about 8000 professional astronomers in the whole US.  About half of them will be at this meeting. Whatever it is that you do for a living, think about HALF of the people who do that very thing in the entire United States having a meeting all in one place. It's gonna be crazy. This is likely to be the biggest meeting of astronomers ever.

But I digress slightly.  December for astronomers is nutty because we are getting ready for this January meeting.  Most of us go more or less straight from holiday travel right to the meeting, so whatever we're presenting better be ready to go by, um, well, now as I type this. And the abstracts for our presentations (whether they be talks or posters) were submitted earlier in the Fall... when December seemed oh-so-long in the future. "Oh, yeah, I'll have time to reduce that data by then.  Haven't looked at it in detail yet, but that shouldn't be a problem."  Right.  

So, December for astronomers is filled with frantic data processing and analysis, hoping to get reasonable results (or at least a pretty picture) to present in January. 

The meetings are sort of like really big science fairs, with 100s of oral presentations and posters, and corporate booths soliciting business in the form of future missions, and book publishers.  The talks are most often REALLY short -- 3 minutes of a talk plus a few minutes for questions.  A few lucky souls get an hour for a plenary talk.  Many more people bring posters, and these posters, surprisingly enough, look vaguely similar to what you remember from high school -- we don't spell out "title, hypothesis, materials, procedure, conclusion" but we might spell out "abstract, data, analysis, results, conclusions."  So you can think of it as kind of a "grown-up science fair."  There are also lots of science meetings, and networking, and policy discussions... and sharing new baby pictures!  It's exciting, but exhausting. It's great to catch up with old friends and make new ones!

In recent years, the American Astronomical Society has started to hold events for the general public on the Saturday afternoon or evening before the professional meeting gets started.  Check out that link for a list of meetings. Are we coming to a city near you?  Please consider coming to the event called AstroZone -- it's a relatively new event, and doesn't seem to have a direct web link (yet?), but Google might be able to find it. The DC event is on Jan 2, at the National Zoo, Amazonia Exhibit Space, 12-4pm.

Gee, I wonder if my poster is done printing yet....?

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Women in Astronomy and Space Science 2009

I've just come back from a slew of travel, including the 3rd ever Women in Astronomy conference, which was at the end of October. I'd been to both of the previous conferences like this -- the first was in 1992, in Baltimore, and I was just between college and graduate school when I went. The second one was in 2003, and that one was at Caltech (and I was a new staff member here when I went to that one too). This one was back in the DC area, and so I went back to the East Coast to attend.

One of the neatest things about these conferences is the sheer numbers of women. As a woman in astronomy, I am used to being a minority at any given conference or committee meeting. Women make up about 25% of the astronomical community, and so it's relatively rare that I sit in a meeting, I look around, and see only few other women. Usually, any given group of astronomers is at least 25-30% women. But at this meeting, there were 280 registrants, and something like 250 of them were women. This is highly unusual for an astronomy meeting, and it's surprisingly energizing. And it's very unusual to have to wait in a line at the restroom! Here we all are.

This meeting deliberately scheduled a lot of networking time, and I used it to good advantage -- I made a lot of connections and I think that several of them will bear fruit.

The meeting also presented a lot of interesting statistics and fostered a lot of discussion about issues that we still face as well as coping mechanisms, and ways to help support women and minorities in the space sciences. The conference organizers will be posting presentations and proceedings on the website above, but here are some semi-random points that stuck in my head.

There are about 8000 members of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the astronomer's professional society. Overall, the fraction of women goes up dramatically as you look at younger and younger ages. In the lowest age bin (college age), it is half women. At older bins (new PhD ages), it's about 30%. This is up from about 20% which is where it was about 10 years ago. The fraction of minorities is downright pathetic. This is clearly where our efforts have to go in the upcoming years. The fraction of women astronomers in other countries is hard to track, and fluctuates a lot, but there are some surprising trends -- there are a stunning fraction of women astronomers, apparently, in places like Argentina, but those numbers can't be separated from the salaries and status levels of those jobs; if there's little pay and no status, then it might not be all that surprising that there are a high fraction of women in those jobs, since the men take other jobs.

I knew the following from the 1992 and 2003 conferences: data were presented again from the social sciences that the same paper written by Jane, James, and J. Smith got different ranks -- James was ranked highest, Jane was ranked lowest. So I publish as L. M. Rebull -- have done so my entire career (when I'm first author).

Again, looking at data from the social sciences, they now have evidence of the old adage that a woman needs to do twice as well to be considered half as good. Women had to publish 2.5 times as much as men to be ranked comparably in a recent sociology study. Argh.

It's also now been documented that women who let it be known that they are mothers (as I am) were ranked more harshly than women who were not mothers, and men who were fathers were ranked more highly than men who were not fathers (Corell, Benard, and Paik 2007). Argh, again.

As we discussed in 2009 (and in 2003), these effects come from the fact that we all have internal biases. It is part of what makes us human, and having the biases is unavoidable. Realizing this and dealing with them is important. There is a website at Harvard that enables you to investigate your own hidden biases. The sociologists have a name for these biases : "schemas." These assumptions, profiling, snap judgments, stereotypes, whatever you want to call them, enable us to function quickly in new situations. If we can assume that a new stoplight of a sort we've never seen before will operate in the same way as other stoplights we've seen, it enables us to assess the situation quickly, and avoid car accidents. We do the same thing with people. But people are more diverse, and often our internal stereotypes do not reflect reality in the case of the group or the individual. Often these assumptions allow us to quickly assess the situation and move forward. But often they do not work. I can think of two pop culture examples. In the movie Legally Blonde, schemas are explicitly crucial to the movie's plot -- everyone (including the audience) assumes that since the main character, Elle, is a petite, attractive blonde (who majored in fashion and was active in her sorority) that there is no way she could be a good lawyer. In this case, Elle is continually battling schemas. In the TV show The Closer, the importance of schemas is more subtle -- people assume that Brenda, a petite blonde with a southern accent, must be dumb. That assumption often traps the criminals into confessing, which is critical to Brenda's success. In this case, she is explicitly making the schemas work for her. We are not often (ever?) shown the situations in which the schemas hurt her, and as a high-ranking woman in a (mostly male) big city police force, it must hurt her from time to time; I wonder what her real-life counterparts would have to say about their lives as portrayed in this show.

Schemas affect all of us, whether we are the members of a minority group or not. Sometimes this is to our benefit, sometimes it is not. Can you think of an instance in your life where others' schemas helped you? Or hurt you? The best we all can hope for is to be aware of these schemas, sensitive to when we might be applying them (especially in the case of evaluating job applications or considering talk invitations, etc), and take steps to avoid applying them in cases where it would hurt ourselves or others. When possible, we need to point out these inequities and do something about them. For example, for years, there were very few female professional musicians in major symphonies. When they implemented blind auditions (where the musician applying for the job walks across a rug -- to avoid the betraying sound of a woman's shoes -- and auditions behind a screen for the judges), the fraction of women rose dramatically to 50%. This change to the process benefited the women, and it also benefited the orchestra as a whole, since now the jobs have gone to the best musicians and the overall quality must have gone up as a result. Try to be aware of all the (unconscious!) assumptions you make about other people on a daily basis, and the implications of those assumptions!

Watch the meeting website for proceedings in the near future, including statistics and summaries of discussions and working groups.

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Universe Expanding

Here in Pasadena the Spitzer conference has effortlessly expanded into the local and more distant universe, powered by great minds and distinguished talks (and what could be considered dangerous amounts of coffee if you aren't an astronomer).

Yesterday afternoon's session focused on some of the key processes that can be studied "up close" in our galaxy, the Milky Way. For example, baby stars growing in stellar "nurseries" (like in the Orion nebula), help us understand what is happening in other galaxies where we can't see individual areas of star formation because they are to far away. It is still tricky to resolve what we see in the Milky Way with what we see on large scales in other galaxies, but it seems that Spitzer has helped make great progress in learning more about these dusty parts of a galaxy. In particular the models of how a star and its planets form (rocky ones like Earth and big gas giants like Jupiter) are producing tantalising results. It's always good to know how you got here...

Today the conference shifted gears to the stuff I'm really interested in - other galaxies, particularly ones that are making lots of stars. These are starburst galaxies and what we call LIRGS and ULIRGS, which stands for (Ultra) Luminous Infrared Galaxies. These are the most luminous galaxies in the universe and were first discovered by IRAS. Spitzer has enabled us to study these galaxies out to large redshifts (which means far, very far and when the universe was much younger). This is important because astronomers want to understand how galaxies back then and the ones now are connected - how are they similar, how are they different, how did they form, how did they get to look this way, what will happen to them next, how do AGN (Active Galactic Nuclei) affect what happens in some galaxies and power others and... So many questions; this should help explain the need for coffee.

One of the speakers here highlighted the fact that when observatories like Herschel, ALMA and JWST make big discoveries in the future, one should remember that Spitzer was a pathfinder for them - it taught us a great deal about where to look, what to look for and gave us the statistics we need to go further in our various areas of astrophysics. I thought this was a great way of thinking of it. Thanks, Spitzer!

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Rocking with "Reionization to Exoplanets"

Admittedly the U2 concert received more media coverage, but the "Reionization to Exoplanets: Spitzer's Growing Legacy" conference is also rocking Pasadena and will be until Wednesday. It has been six years since Spitzer launched and this conference will be showcasing the science it has cultivated. I should add that the conference has to be a "highlights package" given the huge amount of publications and discoveries directly connected with Spitzer. Also, even though Spitzer is now in its warm mission, there is an enormous amount of science from the cold mission that is still being done (and will be for the next few years, if not decades) as data continues to be analysed and studied.

This morning's session was all about exoplanets, which is an area outside my science "comfort zone". This is one of the great things about attending a conference which covers a broad range of topics in that one gets a flavour for the broader science being done in astrophysics, and specifically by Spitzer.

It was pretty amazing to hear that over 400 exoplanets have now been identified (to me it feels like just the other day that the first one was discovered). Not only that, but planets that are just a few Earth masses are being found, and much further out in their solar systems. Things have come a long way!! It was clear that the data that has been streaming in from Spitzer and other missions (and definitely what will come from Kepler!) has revolutionised this field to the point that it is driving the modeling and theory (having lots of data to model and understand is a great way to do science!).

Various techniques are used to study the chemistry and conditions of the exoplanets. The absorption and emission of molecules say a lot about what's going on in their atmospheres and even the temperatures and pressures can be modeled. These planets are SO far away and SO tiny, but it's actually possible to know that there is carbon dioxide, methane (and potentially water vapour) and also figure out how parts of the planet are being heated as it goes around its sun. The only problem is that when we find Earth-like planets in the "habitable" zones (not too hot, not too cold - think Goldilocks, but with planets) of their solar systems, we would need a Stargate to get there. But, right now we are taking the first steps in exploring the other worlds in our Galaxy. Pretty cool...

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Hello!

I'm Luisa, an astronomer here at Spitzer. I study baby stars which will grow up to be like our Sun. But more about that in another posting...

Among many other roles, I am also the director of a program called NITARP, the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program, and we just today finished selecting our new teachers for 2010! I am very excited about this! NITARP is one way in which we get authentic research experiences ultimately into classrooms across the United States. We partner scientists with (primarily) high school teachers, do a research project, and present the results at a professional astronomy meeting; the teachers incorporate the experience into their classroom and share their experience with other teachers.

The Spitzer Science Center (SSC) and the NASA Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) (with help from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO)) are leading this program. We select teachers from a nation-wide selection process. We use archival data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), the NASA/IPAC/NExScI Star and Exoplanet Database (NStED), the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) and other NASA archive holdings. Our funding comes from the Spitzer archive and the other archives at IPAC.

This program is incredibly rewarding for me personally. I have been with the program since its inception (see below) and I have had two different teams. We have looked for -- and found -- baby stars in several different regions. I find it to be a lot of fun to work with the teachers specifically because I learn from them how to be a better teacher just as they learn from me about the latest in astronomy (and more indirectly, computers and technology). Many people doing astronomy outreach work directly with students, and yes, it's great to change a kid's life. But if you change a teacher's life, you impact all the kids that that teacher reaches this year, and next year, and the year after that. It is really hard to beat that multiplicative effect!! Since there are probably only about 8-10,000 professional astronomers in the US, we can't reach everyone -- we have to do something to multiply our efforts.

Real research is totally unlike science as it is portrayed in textbooks, and that's an important lesson for the people involved in this project. By the time it makes it into textbooks, often science is portrayed as a never-ending series of right answers. Real science has a lot of dead ends as we struggle to find out what the 'right answer' is. Science problems in textbooks have well-defined problems, specific methods you're supposed to use to solve them, and right (exact) answers -- for example, 1.2 can be wrong when 1.3 is right. Real science is not quite "made up as you go along" but it may feel that way. Different people approach the same problem in different ways and many answers can all be right (1.2 and 1.3 can both be right answers). The only way you know it's the right answer is if you know that everything you did to get there is right. That's a big paradigm shift in thinking from "textbook science." And that's one big thing that I hope that the participants in this program learn.

There are lots of little lessons along the way too. Many of the students involved in the program note that they learned that "astronomers are normal, friendly people." One student was disappointed that the software she was using (which was the real software that professional astronomers use) did not tell her everything about a star when she clicked on it. The software she was used to using was software for amateur asronomers that goes out on the internet to find related information about the object, and most amateurs click on famous objects. That click-to-learn-more feature doesn't exist in the professional astronomy software she was using. But the really big lesson was that she was among the first people on our planet to care about that individual star, so she already knew all that all of humanity already knew about that object.

The original incarnation of this program was started in 2004 and called the Spitzer Space Telescope Research Program for Teachers and Students. Leveraging on a well-established teacher professional development program, the SSC offered this program to teachers in the Teacher Leaders in Research Based Science Education (TLRBSE), an ongoing program at the NOAO. This NSF-sponsored program touches the formal education community through a national audience of well-trained and supported middle and high school teachers. We had three rounds of teacher selection and research projects. Starting in 2009, we got new funding and a new name (NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Project -- NITARP).

New this year, not only are we expanding the teacher side of the program to include community college professors, but also we are expanding on the IPAC and JPL side to include some of the non-astronomer professionals working here. This will bring new skills and insight and role models to the teams.

One of the teams in the original program started a wiki where we could share all sorts of materials we developed. The next generation NITARP project has inherited this wiki and will continue to develop it. Even if you are not part of this program, you can check out the resources on the wiki and learn how to play with Spitzer data (and eventually other archive data) yourself!

The teachers participating in the original program were: Jeff Adkins, John Blackwell, Kareen Borders, Howard T. Chun, Lauren K. Chapple, Harlan V. Devore, Velvet Dowdy, Cris DeWolf, Peter Guastella, Rosa Hemphill, Ardis Herrold, Chelen H. Johnson, Virginia Jones, Susan Kelly, Thomas Loughran, Anthony R. Maranto, Chris Martin, David W. McDonald, Jeff Paradis, Vincent Pereira, Peter Pitman, Steve Rapp, Theresa Roelofsen, John Schaefers, Babs Sepulveda, Linda Stefaniak, Timothy S. Spuck, Dwight Taylor, Jen Tetler, Beth Thomas, Cynthia Weehler and Lynne Zielinski. Here is a page with all of their accomplishments as part of this program. Support scientists included: Ranga-Ram Chary, Vandana Desai, John Feldmeier, Rose Finn, Varoujan Gorjian, Don Hoard, Steve Howell, Mark Lacy, Luisa M. Rebull, and Gregory Rudnick.

And finally, here for the first time ever, is the brand-new list of teachers to start with the program in January 2010! They are high school teachers, middle school teachers, and community college professors. They are from big cities and small towns. They will study nearby things and far away things. Look for results of their projects in January 2011!!

Team working with Luisa Rebull (SSC)

• Chelen Johnson (Breck School, Minneapolis, MN) teacher mentor for team
• Kevin McCarron (Oak Park and River Forest High School, Oak Park, IL)
• Vivian Hoette (Yerkes Observatory, Williams Bay, WI)
• Carolyn Mallory (Pierce College, Woodland Hills, CA)

Team working with Varoujan Gorjian (SSC/JPL)

• Tim Spuck (Oil City Regional Senior High School, Oil City, PA) teacher mentor for team
• Kate Meredith (LaCrosse area schools, LaCrosse, WI)
• Helen Petach (Fairview High School, Boulder, CO)
• Elizabeth Ramseyer (Niles West High School, Skokie, IL)

Team working with Steve Howell (NOAO)

• Sally Seebode (San Mateo High School, San Mateo, CA) teacher mentor for team
• Darryl Stanford (San Mateo Community College, San Mateo, CA)
• Dean Drumheller (San Mateo Community College, San Mateo, CA)

Second team working with Steve Howell (NOAO)

• Beth Thomas (North Middle School, Great Falls, MT) teacher mentor for team
• Richard DeCoster (Niles West High School, Skokie, IL)
• Peggy Piper (Lincoln-Way North High School, Frankfort, IL)

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