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News
Page contains news events closely related to CfA activities.
Centre for Astronomy Open Nights
NUI Galway's Centre of Astronomy will continue its programme of open evenings in 2012 at its Imbusch Observatory in Dangan. The Observatory provides state-of-the-art observing facilities for NUI Galway's Astrophysics students and the Open evenings are an opportunity for the general public to come in and visit.
Weather permitting, the free open evenings will take place on 25 January, 8 and 22 Feburary and 7 March at 7pm.
Bookings are limited to two tickets per person and is strictly by ticket only, on a first come first served basis. All bookings are by email and those interested should send requests to tara.shanahan@nuigalway.ie
CfA participated in Galway Science & Technology Festival 2011
As part of the Galway science & technology festival 2011, centre for astronomy organised 3-D tours of the universe for the visiting school students between 14th and 25th November and for general public on 27th November.
The show was a big sucess as all the five shows on the final day of the festival ran to full capacity. Some photographs from the event:
Important pulsar discovery by NUI Galway Astronomers
NUI Galway Astronomers participate in major pulsar discovery
Astronomers at four Irish third level institutions have participated in the detection of pulsed gamma-ray emission from the Crab Pulsar at energies far beyond what current theoretical models of pulsars can explain.
With energies exceeding 100 billion electron volts the surprising gamma-ray pulses were detected by the international VERITAS collaboration using an array of telescopes at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona. Their results are published in a paper in the October 7th issue of the prestigious journal Science
The Irish scientists have been involved in the search for this pulsed emission for over two decades. The Irish team members include Dr Gary Gillanders and Dr Mark Lang at the National University of Ireland Galway, Dr John Quinn at University College Dublin, Dr Paul Reynolds at Cork Institute of Technology and Dr Pat Moriarty at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology.
The Crab pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star, the collapsed core of a massive star that exploded in a spectacular supernova in the year 1054, leaving behind the brilliant Crab Nebula with the pulsar at its heart. Spinning at 30 times a second the pulsar emits a rotating beam of radiation like a lighthouse beacon. Current theoretical models of the pulsar predict that the maximum energy of pulsed gamma-rays should be about 10 billion electron volts so it was very significant to find emission with energies ten times higher. Further observations to characterise the very high energy gamma-ray emission and new theoretical models will be required to explain the physical mechanism behind it.
The Irish involvement in VERITAS is part funded by Science Foundation Ireland.
Centre for Astronomy Open Nights
NUI Galway's Centre of Astronomy will continue its programme of open evenings at its Imbusch Observatory in Dangan. The Observatory provides state-of-the-art observing facilities for NUI Galway's Astrophysics students and the Open evenings are an opportunity for the general public to come in and visit.
Weather permitting, the free open evenings will take place on 12 and 26 October, 9 and 23 November and 7 and 21 December at 7pm.
An informative hour-long lecture will be followed by a hands-on viewing of the sky by night, weather permitting. The Imbusch Astronomical Observatory was opened in 2004 and is used by students studying Physics and Astrophysics at NUI Galway. The observatory is equipped with a modern computer controlled 16" telescope and camera, and a radio telescope with a hydrogen line spectrometer, which is able to map out and measure the velocity of the sun and the Milky Way. There is also a 10" portable telescope - computer controlled – for visual observations of planets, star clusters, nebulae and other bright objects.
Bookings are limited to two tickets per person and is strictly by ticket only, on a first come first served basis. All bookings are by email and those interested should send requests to tara.shanahan@nuigalway.ie
Sea2sky
Galway astronomers will be taking part in the Sea2sky event which will be held in Salthill on September 23rd. For more details see www.sea2sky.ie
NUIG Pulsar research in the news
Press Release about pulsar observations, see http://www.siliconrepublic.com/innovation/item/23320-astronomers-at-nui-galway/
Pulsars Discoveries by NUI Galway Astronomers
Date, tbc: Astronomers from NUI Galway’s Centre for Astronomy have made an important breakthrough in the understanding of how pulsars work, and have recently published their findings in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The team, led by NUI Galway’s Dr Andy Shearer, compared optical observations with a detailed model of the structure of the pulsar. From this, using their inverse mapping or reverse engineering approach, they were able to establish for the first time that most of the light from the pulsar comes from close to the star’s surface. This is contrary to most pulsar models and points to a new way of analysing observational data from pulsars.
Dr Shearer said: “This is the culmination of ten years work. Our success is based upon having some talented post-graduate students and post-doctoral researchers combined with looking at the problem in a different way. The result shows the importance of our approach of combining numerical models run on large supercomputers with detailed observations. To follow these calculations we will use the SFI funded Galway Astronomical Stokes Polarimeter (GASP) to finally establish the conditions around a pulsar and solve a forty year old problem - how do pulsars work?”
In another development, NUI Galway astronomers, working with colleagues in Italy, the UK and US, have discovered an X-ray bright tail coming from a pulsar. The tail was discovered by combining optical observations taken with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory. The pulsar, known as PSR J0357, about half a million years old and is located 1,600 light years from Earth with a tail of over four light years across. These findings have been recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Despite over forty years of observation and theory, pulsars, which are rapidly rotating neutron stars, have defied an explanation of how they work. Pulsars are about one and a half times the mass of the sun, but are so small they could fit into Galway Bay. Consequently they represent extreme matter. They have a magnetic field which can be greater than a million billion times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. Their density is also about a million, billion times greater than the density of the Earth. They are formed during a massive explosion at the end of a star’s life known as a Type II supernova. During a supernova, the light from a single star outshines its host galaxy which contains up to a hundred billion stars.
The work at NUI Galway involved observations of the Crab pulsar formed in April 1054 when it was observed as a daytime star - unusually very few observations of this event come from Europe although it was observed by Irish monks and recorded in the Irish Annals.
GUFI reported in the Irish Times
On the 4th August the Irish times reported on GUFI - Galway Ultra-Fast Imager - see http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sciencetoday/2011/0804/1224301812025.html
National University of Ireland, Galway,
University Road, Galway, Ireland. Phone: +353 91 524411