All posts by admin

Visit to IIHS Bangalore and IUCAA Pune

After classes finished at Yale-NUS College, I made a visit to two of my favourite cities in India, Bangalore (home of the Raman Research Institute and IIHS), and Pune (home to the IUCAA astrophysics Institute). The trip to Bangalore and Pune allowed me to meet with some of my collaborators both in astrophysics and from our work with the Liberal Arts and Sciences in India. In Bangalore, I met with the director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bangalore, Aromar Revi, who described some of the new programs at IIHS, and updated me on their plans to expand their institute into undergraduate education. At present the IIHS offers a Master’s degree in Urban Practice and conducts research on cities and urban areas within India and beyond. Aromar is also a member of the IPCC group studying global climate change. We had a great discussion about IIHS, global warming, and the future of liberal arts in India. While in Bangalore I also had a great visit with Lakshmi Saripalli at the Raman Research Institute, and we discussed her recent work in astronomy and our future plans for meetings on the Liberal Arts in India.
After Bangalore, I met with my friend Somak Raychaudhury, the Director of IUCAA in Pune and long-time collaborator in the Future of Liberal Arts in India. We discussed new programs at IUCAA, the new Indian AstroSAT astronomical satellite, and the possibility of development of remotely operated telescopes within India for undergraduate research and teaching. Somak was interested in developing small remotely operated telescopes at the IUCAA observatory in Girawali (http://igo.iucaa.in/) – and we made a plan to develop a pair of small telescopes in this site about 100 km north of Pune to enable students from across India and beyond to remotely acquire data to develop their own research projects.
My wife Bidushi and I gave a talk at IUCAA about astronomy and space tech in Singapore and shared the work that we have been doing at her Space company known as Bhattacharya Space Enterprises. I talked about our work with the recent supernova and other observational projects I have been doing at Yale-NUS with my students. I also outlined a system for remote observations that can help foster a global undergraduate collaborative research community in astronomy, through a networked platform that combines tutorials in astronomy education, observational proposal submission, and telescope scheduling. The system would allow for a group of students to plan, propose and implement their own research projects in observational astronomy using a network of telescopes across the earth. An outline of how the system might work is shown below – and I hope to develop this platform to link students from the US, India and other countries to operate a global network for undergraduate research in astronomy.
coverslide.iucaatalk
remote.telescope.network.overview
Along with the visits to research centers in Bangalore and Pune, we had a number of very interesting visits and discussions with engineers and scientists involved with space technology and astronomical instrumentation. The instrumentation group at IUCAA has done an amazing job developing the adaptive optics system known as Robo-AO, and a fiber fed spectrograph for the Indian telescopes. We met with Anamparambu Ramaprakash who showed us the IUCAA instrument lab – photos are below. It was great to see Ramaprakash, who I met at Caltech about a decade ago, when he was working in the Caltech instrument lab on Robo-AO with our Pomona College student Dan Beeler. Dan is a CTO at a startup company in the Boston area that is making advanced medical technology – another testimonial of the power of liberal arts in STEM!
iucaa - 5 iucaa - 4 iucaa - 2 iucaa - 1
Another highlight was a series of discussions with Aafaque Khan, a young scientist and lead engineer on the Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT) on-board Aditya-L1, an Indian spacecraft. Aafaque was part of the Young India Fellowship, a Delhi-based masters program in liberal arts that was the precursor for the new Ashoka University. I discussed the latest developments at both YIF and Ashoka, and it is wonderful to see how the Liberal Arts in India has connected to a broad range of programs and institutions, and no doubt Aafaque’s broad education in humanities and social sciences from the YIF program has helped him in his work at IUCAA. From the discussion with Aafaque, I was inspired and look forward to further discussions in India about liberal arts and astronomy. We are planning a meeting at Ashoka University for March 2018 and I also hope to visit Ashoka University some time to give talks on Indian astronomy in the coming years.
Resources – 
Our Talk to IUCAA – with Bidushi Bhattacharya, CEO, BSE – “Island Universe – Astrophysics and Space Tech in Singapore” – IUCAA.talk.with.bid.April.2017

Teaching Portfolio Workshops

As part of my work as Director of the Yale-NUS Teaching and Learning Center, I ran several workshops for faculty on creating teaching portfolios. The faculty of Yale-NUS College work hard on developing innovative common curriculum courses, conducting world-class scholarship and building an entirely new undergraduate college in Asia offering an innovative liberal arts approach to education. My job is also to help them tell the story of their own teaching practice – which is best documented in the form of a teaching portfolio.
During the prior year, I have been studying teaching portfolios with help from the dazzling array of visitors to Singapore sponsored by the NUS CDTL. This included Dan Bernstein from U. Kansas (https://psych.ku.edu/daniel-j-bernstein), who is the author of the book “Making Teaching Visible – Course Portfolios and the Peer Review of Teaching.”  (https://www.amazon.com/Making-Teaching-Learning-Visible-Portfolios/dp/1882982967) Dan gave a great talk on the benefits of a portfolio as a mechanism for disseminating  teaching innovations within a community on a campus or even across a wide geographic region. Later on we had a visit by other scholars such as Rick Glofcheski of U Hong Kong who has repeatedly won awards for his teaching as the best instructor of all of Hong Kong. His work is also well documented by teaching portfolios, as is the entire program in Hong Kong for teaching awards. At NUS I was on the  UTEC committee that would judge NUS faculty teaching portfolios for teaching awards, and from that experience I gained a lot of insight in the way that such portfolios are structured. A final point of information came from a visit by Thomas Olsson from Lund university who presented on how his university uses teaching portfolios.

CTL.portfolio.worskshop - 2 CTL.portfolio.worskshop - 1

In my workshop I tried to bring all of this together and convince the faculty about the power of a teaching portfolio to present evidence of the nature of a professors “teaching practice” – ideally one that documents with concrete evidence of student learning and a thoroughly integrative approach to teaching that includes deep reflection on student learning, basing course design on research-validated teaching approaches, and incorporating assessment into the modifications of the courses over the year. The result is a “reflective and integrative practice” which showcases a professor’s teaching philosophy, along with examples of student learning and other pieces of evidence to provide insights into how the instructor thinks about teaching and improves.  I stressed to the faculty that no one style of teaching is best – and that it is a very personal process of discovery, with some thoughtful assessment built in, that can help faculty arrive at an awareness of their teaching philosophy. One tool for starting is the Teaching Perspectives Inventory – which divides one’s teaching approach into components and helps faculty become aware of some of their motivations for teaching. In addition to these sort of diagnostics, frequent mid-course surveys and a careful study of post course feedback is essential for improving one’s teaching and becoming aware of one’s strengths.
The materials from this workshop are below – and I look forward to sharing these portfolios and techniques with other faculty as I am convinced that such portfolios are rewarding and valuable to create, and can help faculty develop more effective teaching practices and improve the learning of their students.

Resources for Teaching Portfolios:
Slides from my Yale-NUS CTL Workshop:

Visit from Rainier Weiss to Yale-NUS and LIGO Gravitational Wave Discovery

One of the most exciting discoveries of the past few years is the detection of gravitational radiation using the LIGO interferometer. These magnificent machines have been developed over more than 20 years, led by Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne at MIT and Caltech. After such a long period of development, it is wonderful to see these machines make such an exciting discovery – and to give humans their first view of the universe using gravitational radiation. It is not an exaggeration to state that this discovery in many ways is like Galileo’s first view of the heavens in 1610 with a telescope. And like Galileo, the presence of LIGO and gravitational wave telescopes will open up dazzling arrays of new discoveries. The gravitational waves can traverse all of space, and pass through galaxies, planets and even the early universe. The extreme penetrating power of gravitational waves make them a powerful diagnostic of previously invisible explosions and entirely new classes of astrophysical objects.
raiweiss
The discovery of gravitational radiation was based on a merging of two very massive black holes – one at 29 and one at 36 solar masses – that collapsed together and merged in a mere one tenth of a second. The waves were detected on September 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. Since the objects were billions of light years away, however, we are only now detecting the cataclysmic merger of black holes 1.3 billion years ago!
During the merger the new black hole was created, and over 3 solar masses of energy was liberated in just 0.1 seconds. As E = mc² – this results in a luminosity that is over a trillion times greater than the brightest objects known in the universe – the quasars. These titanic energies pass through us and through our planet undiminished and undetected – until now – as LIGO for the first time can listen in on these cosmic quakes and begin to study and measure the presence of previously unknown giant merging black holes.
raiweiss - 1 (1) raiweiss - 2 (1)
One of our Rectors at Yale-NUS College, Sarah Weiss, is the daughter of Rainer Weiss, the LIGO co-developer. We had the great fortune of two days with Rai Weiss at Yale-NUS on April 9, and he gave marvellous talks that both described the development of LIGO, and the significance of the discovery of gravitational radiation. Our students had the chance to learn directly from him about the incredible precision of LIGO – which is capable of measuring motions within its mirrors of the magnitude of 1/10,000 the size of the diameter of a proton.
raiweiss - 4 (1)

Supernova 2017cbv in NGC 5643

As our data from the NGC 5643 supernova continues to come in, we are building up an ever better light curve from our Supernova!  The Type Ia supernova is caused by a white dwarf star collapsing and creating a cornucopia of new elements – Nickel, Iron, Cobalt, and also Gold, Platinum and other heavy elements. The explosion and death of the star seeds the galaxy with new life – in the form of a blast wave of enriched elements which speeds away from the explosion at a fraction of the speed of light. The evolution of the light curve follows several stages. The first stage includes a rapid increase in brightness which comes from the expansion of the supernova – which i the early phases has a luminosity that increases with R², as the supernova remains hot and dense and is unable to cool. As the supernova reaches maximum brightness, the expansion is met with a cooling that causes the supernova luminosity to level off; in all such explosions luminosity scales as R²×T^4, and at maximum brightness these factors tend to offset each other. After maximum brightness, the radioactive decay products in the supernova begin to inject gamma rays into the cloud, heating it up and extending the brightness of the supernova into what is sometimes called a “shoulder” of the light curve. The half lives of radioactive Nickel and Cobalt are fixed, and provide an extension of the light curve for several months before a stable isotope of Iron is produced.
supernova_light
With our telescope in Chile and our crew of Yale-NUS students, we have built a very capable group for studying supernovae. The students, Rohan Naidu (Yale-NUS ’17), Jerrick Wee, Joanna Wang, and Nilotpal Chakraborty (Yale-NUS ’19) have worked together very well and each have contributed toward our research paper which is being written now at Caltech. Our light curve has continued to improve and we now have combined observations in the BVRI and YJHK filters – giving a wide range of observations from blue optical light all the way to the infrared. These combinations of colors allow us to measure the temperature of the supernova, and to detect the various phases of radioactive decay and cooling in the supernova. When combined with a mathematical model of the expansion, we can also learn about the amount of dust and absorption in the galaxy and foreground, and more precisely measure the peak luminosity and initial detonation time of the supernova.
We are working with several of the amazing Carnegie scientists in Pasadena during June and July to prepare a paper on the object. We are grateful to Ben Shappee (one  of the leaders of the ASASSN project, and now Carnegie/Princeton/Hubble Fellow), Rachael Beaton (Carnegie/Princeton/Hubble Fellow) for their help interpreting our data and guiding our work. The Carnegie Observatories also have created the amazing Las Campanas Remote Observatory – and through Michael Long and the OCIW crew our class at Yale-NUS College was able to obtain data from the supernova during class time in Singapore to help contribute to their light curve that they are separately publishing. Our group of students, along with the ZTF Caltech Summer Undergraduate Astronomy Institute, was able to share some of the summer with Carnegie Observatories as we visited their historic center on Santa Barbara street, and merged our undergraduate researchers together in visits to Palomar Observatory and to the Caltech atheneum. You can see more about this joint effort at our ZTF Undergraduate institute web site – http://ztf.commons.yale-nus.edu.sg/
We are using the modelling packages known as SNCOSMOS and SNooPY to make these models, and are getting some great results on this exciting object!
supernova2

Coursera Partners Conference in Boulder, CO

On March 28-31 I had the opportunity to represent Yale-NUS College at the Coursera Partners Conference in Boulder, CO. Richard Levin, the Coursera CEO, suggested that I attend, as I was planning to work with him and Coursera during my scheduled sabbatical for Fall 2017. The meeting included all the leading online course developers, and offered a chance to glimpse some of the ways in which online courses and technology are shaping education at larger universities across the world. The MOOC has come along way since it began around 2012, and new formats that integrate in-person instruction, artificial intelligence, and that offer course credit or micro degrees have added a new dimension to the online learning experience.
coursera - 13 (1) coursera - 14 (1) coursera - 12 (1) coursera - 9 (1) coursera - 8 (1) coursera - 7 (1) coursera - 6 (1) coursera - 4 (1)
During the conference we heard talks from many of the leaders in higher education in a number of very interesting keynote talks. The meeting began with an introduction from University of Colorado officials, who pointed out the growth in CU and its role in creating patents and new companies in the Boulder region. Daphne Koller gave a wonderful keynote explaining the history of Coursera, and some of the ways that their online courses have profoundly improved the lives of students across the earth. In her words, Coursera was about “transforming life by accessing the best learning environment.” she is proud of the 25 million “learners” and 100 million enrolments, and noted trends that include increasing enrolments across the world with largest growth (over 50%) in South America and Africa.
Additional keynotes in the first day included a talk by Ted Mitchell, former U.S. Undersecretary of education, who discussed how higher education is changing and how online learning is helping shape the future of education.  Some interesting elements include “learning hubs” that the US State Department is running to provide online courses across the world. Some of the refugee camps in Kenya and elsewhere are opening online learning centers, and Coursera has started a free certificate program for refugees to help them get an education. One quote from the meeting, from H.G. Wells, was that “History is a race between education and catastrophe” – and clearly this quote applies to some of these present day situations.
coursera - 11 (1)
coursera - 10 (1)
Rick Levin gave a great roadmap of where Coursera is going in the coming years, and noted that “we’re part of a world changing enterprise.” He stressed the importance of access, impact and quality, and hopes to make Coursera respond with answers to two questions – “how to respond to the needs of life-long learners?” and “how to increase social impact?” Rick gave some additional statistics about how Coursera is reaching a broad demographic – its students include 45% from emerging markets, and 89% over the age of 22. They are experiencing a large growth with 6 million unique “learners” in the past 12 months, 500,000 paid learners (77% growth) and some 200,000 on financial aid.  Levin is convinced that Coursera is doing a lot to help people in the “underdeveloped world” as well as responding to the needs of  millions of people who need to train for new jobs and to respond to the future which will require skills beyond the traditional education experience of most people. Levin described some of the new degrees being developed at Coursera – such as the “stackable micro-credential” and other mini degrees  from universities such as U. Illinois and a French Business school in both tech and management subjects. These micro degrees appear to be a big part of the future of Coursera.
One of the most interesting of the keynotes came in the second day when Ashok Goel from Georgia Tech, who described how Artificial Intelligence had created a virtual teaching assistant in the Computer Science department at Georgia Tech. This virtual TA was given the name “Jill Watson” and was trained by analysing the responses of human TAs to student questions in the prior years of the course. Using neural net and other advanced algorithms, Jill was designed to create an accurate and very human set of responses to student email queries. The course designers were careful to be sure that Jill only would provide answers when her algorithm suggested an extremely high probability of having a correct response, as to prevent mis information from this technique. The students were not told that Jill was an AI “bot” – and some even had such a high opinion of her that they wanted to nominate her for the best TA award at Georgia Tech! This amazing (and somewhat disturbing) use of AI was also the subject of an October 2016 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, with the title “When the Teaching Assistant is a Robot.”
coursera - 2 (1) coursera - 3 (1)
During the breakout sessions and discussions I had a chance to meet a wide range of experts in education and discussed with them some of the ideas about how well online learning can help students in smaller liberal arts colleges. Like we learned within the LACOL (Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning) project, the main emphases for liberal arts colleges are to improve the “in class” experience of students, as well as to increase the ability of students from diverse backgrounds to build their experience and performance in certain cases. The LACOL experience showed us that for small liberal arts colleges online learning in a few areas shows great promise. This includes an online quantitative skills course – perhaps as part of a “bridge program” for entering students, a method for offering small enrolment language courses to students distributed across a wide geographic area, and using technologies to help students work  collaboratively to annotate and discuss advanced literary texts in a social media type environment.
 coursera - 20 (1)
coursera - 21 (1)
 Some of the pictures below also come from a brief tour of the Fiske Planetarium at CU Boulder. My old astronomer friend Doug Duncan was at the conference and took a few of us around campus to see the model solar system and his amazing planetarium. Doug has done a fantastic job building up the planetarium, developing original shows, and providing fantastic outreach to a broad range of students, K-12 teachers and college undergraduates. His current project is to prepare for the 2017 August solar eclipse, and he made a point to promote safe eclipse viewing with our Coursera conference attendees!
coursera - 19 (1) coursera - 18 (1) coursera - 16 (1) coursera - 17 (1) coursera - 1 (8)
As online technologies advance I am sure that they will have a profound effect on all institutions of higher learning, including liberal arts colleges. It was wonderful seeing how these technologies are advancing and I look forward to seeing how in the coming years both the in-class and “asynchronous” parts of online learning can be fine-tuned to help students learn more efficiently and effectively.

Visit to Yale-NUS by Lucas Swineford from Yale University

During March 19-24 we hosted Lucas Swineford, The Executive Director of Digital Education and Dissemination at Yale University. We hosted Lucas at Yale-NUS College to discuss technology enhanced teaching and to explore new ways of using digital media and flipped classes in our Yale-NUS curriculum.  Lucas gave a wonderful talk about the developments at the Yale Teaching Center, and we met with Lucas and many of the NUS leaders of teaching and learning in the Center for the Development of Teaching and Learning (CDTL), the Center for Information Technology (CIT) and the NUS Provost’s office. Lucas’ visit was also a great opportunity to catalyse stronger connections between the Yale-NUS CTL and our Educational Resources and Technology (ERT) division.
In Lucas’ talk we learned about how the Yale Teaching Center operates and some the new ways in which Yale has integrated technology into its curriculum. A number of new online courses feature synchronous online connections between students across the earth, as well as more conventional MOOC type courses, and every other type of instruction in between. I was delighted to learn more about Yale and to share some of our innovations at Yale-NUS with Lucas and hope that his visit will bring tighter connections between Yale-NUS, NUS, Yale and enhance our technology enhanced teaching.
In Lucas’ talk on March 23, he noted that the Yale President, Peter Salovey, had made a commitment to being the best at teaching among research universities. One key element in that initiative was the restructuring of the Yale Teaching Center, in a beautiful new facility in the center of the Sterling Library. The central location and enhanced resources embodies Yale’s commitment to teaching. Lucas Swineford, along with Jennifer Frederick, the Executive Director of the Yale Teaching Center, have done great work enhancing their support of faculty and expanding online and technology enhanced programs at Yale. Lucas described how they now have an online degree for physicians assistants which will be available in 2018, and how Yale Summer School has been offering online synchronous courses since 2010.
lucas.swineford - 4
In developing technology at Yale, Lucas has been able to reach a large number of faculty by convincing them that the technology will advance their students and will be easy to use. One example was the roll-out of their new learning management system, Canvas, where Yale used an extensive advertising campaign among the faculty. One piece of the campaign was  faculty offered testimonials that began “I chose Canvas because..” and then gave concrete reasons for learning Canvas. A web site, http://gotocanvas.yale.edu, was set up to enable faculty to easily learn more, and workshops in advanced canvas were set up. Key features like online quizzes and integration with the online forum piazza were implemented and early adopters were able to help other faculty learn how to make the most of the system.
One very clever use of the online Coursera platform was developed at Yale to connect with their alumni. The http://site yale.coursera.org was set up to allow exclusive alumni offerings, where alumni could have in-person conversations with some of the faculty as they offered short courses and lectures for a small fee. Online courses feature a prominent role in the Freshman Scholars at Yale program, where a new ONEXYS (online experiences for Yale Scholars) program (http://onexys.yale.edu/) offers a variety of programs, including a math skills course (Math115)  to help students prior to their enrolment at Yale.
Other technical advances at Yale include full integration of the lecture capture system Panopto into classrooms, and development of advanced media carts enabling high quality video conferencing and multi-party projection within classrooms.
lucas.swineford - 3xlucas.swineford - 1 lucas.swineford - 2

Visit to Thai National Observatory and NARIT

One of the highlights of the Spring Semester was to visit the Thai National Observatory with my observational astronomy students from Yale-NUS College. Starting in 2014 I began investigating the observational astronomy facilities within the region of Singapore. I set up a conference at Yale-NUS College on the “Global Observatory Network for Solar System Observations” (GONSSO), and invited astronomers from Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, India, California and Malaysia to participate. This meeting was very productive and brought about collaborations with astronomers in all of the locations mentioned above – both site visits with students, and undergraduate summer projects grew out of this meeting. Examples include an undergraduate research program at Taiwan’s NCU and Lulin Observatory, an undergraduate research program at India’s Raman Research institute, collaborative research visits and talks at Korea’s SNU and the IUCAA in India, field trips with students to Malaysia to visit the National Observatory in Langkawi, and now the visit to NARIT in Thailand.
TNO_NARIT - 6 TNO_NARIT - 5
The Thai national observatory is a wonderful place – with a forward looking director of NARIT, Boonrucksar Soonthornthum. The NARIT and TNO staff graciously hosted our crew of 6 Yale-NUS students as we visited their headquarters in Chiang Mai. During our visit we made use of their 0.5 meter telescope from the Chiang Mai headquarters with a remote interface. Our crew of students camped out in the control room, and each student began to observe targets for their final projects in my observational astronomy class. Six separate projects were conducted – which included observations of binary stars, variable star light curves, HR diagrams of open clusters, and imaging of elliptical and spiral galaxies. The students were able to get spectacular data very efficiently with the telescopes from NARIT. We had the added bonus of being able to walk right outside and enjoy wonderful street food from a night market across the street!  During the visit we also had a chance to tour Chiang Mai and its wonderful temples.
TNO_NARIT - 8 TNO_NARIT - 7
After a very enjoyable first night in Chiang Mai, we jumped into a bus, and drove South to the highest point in Thailand – the mountain known as Doi Inthanon, which at 2,457 meters (8061 feet) provided the best observing in Thailand. The NARIT and TNO people kindly let us stay at their guest lodge and we spent the night observing student projects as well as experiencing a glorious clear night on the roof of the observatory building. At the TNO are 2.4 meter telescopes, a 0.7 meter and 0.5 meter telescope and a very modern and comfortable control room which became the nerve center for our operations. The students and I really enjoyed the chance to see the Milky Way, and I gave them a complete star tour on the roof with a green laser pointer and binoculars. We were able to identify the whole set of constellations in the North and South (one advantage of observing near the equator). Perhaps more importantly the students became experts on the night sky – with groups of them observing open clusters and nebulae with binoculars on the roof, and other students taking beautiful deep images on the roof of the Milky Way. Below are some photos from our wonderful visit to Thailand. WE are very grateful to teh NARIT and TNO staff for hosting our Yale-NUS students.
TNO_NARIT - 1 TNO_NARIT - 2 TNO_NARIT - 4 TNO_NARIT - 9 TNO_NARIT - 10

Supernova in NGC 5643!

During our Observational Astronomy class at Yale-NUS College, we had the good fortune to have a nearby supernova explode – just before our Monday class!  On the Sunday before our class (March 12), I received an email from one of my friends at Carnegie Observatories noting that a new supernova was discovered in NGC 5643, a galaxy about 51 million light years away. As chance would have it, our class at Yale-NUS College in Singapore was scheduled to use our remotely operated telescope in Chile known as LCRO that morning. One of the wonderful things about doing astronomy in Singapore is NOT the weather, but instead the possibility of remote observing with a site 12 hours of time change away. In our case, we had access to the Las Campanas Remote Observatory, a wonderful 0.3-meter telescope in the best observational astronomy site on earth – Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. With the 12 hour time change, our astronomy class in Singapore was able to enjoy live remote observing during our 9:00AM class time!  I was habituated to having breakfast on class days, then opening up the telescope right after breakfast – as it was just getting dark in Chile after my Singapore breakfast. Then after focusing the telescope I would start class and have the class pick targets for observations. This particular class we were going to be working more with variable stars – perhaps getting a light curve of a Cepheid. However Nature gave us a much better plan – being able to participate in cutting-edge research – watching the final days of a star as it explodes and creates new elements that one day could become part of a planetary system or even beings far from Earth!  We began studying the supernova in earnest – with a guest lecture from Rachael Beaton of the Carnegie observatories (shown below), and class photometry projects finding zero points and new data for the supernova as the explosion unfolded during our semester. Some of those class photos are below.
ngc5643
Our first images showing the B and R band exposure of the supernova (lower left)
supernova - 5 supernova - 6
supernova - 8 supernova - 4 supernova - 2 supernova - 3 supernova - 1 supernova.lightcurve - 1 supernova.lightcurve - 2
The class immediately took to the project and we shifted toward observations of the supernova as a class project. Our group of three students – Joanna, Jerrick and Nilotpal, met regularly during the rest of the semester, along with our Yale-NUS senior Rohan Naidu. With the students, I was able to learn how best to use Python, astrometry.net and other tools to automate the process of acquiring magnitudes of the supernova, and to plot them. We also began a collaboration with the Carnegie Observatories – and look forward to working with them this summer. Below are some of our light curves from the supernova – and we are extremely excited to be involved. Nearby Supernovae like this one are somewhat like a “Rosetta Stone” of the cosmic distance scale. Within the galaxy one can detect Cepheid variable stars, and also measure the “Red Giant Branch” by gathering images with 1000’s of stars. The TypeIa supernova is the premier mechanism for measuring the distances to the farthest galaxies. Within a nearby TypeIa supernova it is possible to calibrate the supernova against two other distance indicators – the Cepheids and the Red Giant stars. Our group is working with Ben Shappee and Rachael Beaton from Carnegie Observatories and we hope to get a paper together soon! At this point we have worked out the details of the star’s initial detonation – the timing of the arrival of the first photons was on March 9, and our team and the Carnegie team started getting data one day later with LCRO and then every night afterwards through July with our Yale 1.3-meter telescope in Chile. This means that we began observing the supernova about 19 days before maximum light – one of the earliest observations for a supernova ever!  It is also important to note that while we first detected this event on March 10, the actual explosion actually happened over 50 million light years ago!  You can see our latest light curve (from June 2017) below.
supernovalightcurve

Institute of Physics Singapore Meeting – Talk on “Cosmic Explosions”

During the Institute of Physics Singapore (IPS) meeting on Feb 22-24 (http://www.ipsmeeting.org/), I was invited to present a talk on “Cosmic Explosions” that related some of the discoveries from our GROWTH relay of telescopes based at Caltech. The talk included a mix of physics professors and students from across Singapore, and it was a great chance to share some of the latest astrophysics results with them. During the talk I highlighted “infant supernovae,” gravitational lensing sources, gamma ray bursts, and the discovery of gravitational waves, and how all of these sources are now possible to catch using telescopes that are optimized for discovering such “transients” and following up the discoveries with a global network of telescopes.

screenshot_3722

The audience for the talk included a number of students from Yale-NUS College, and as the meeting was hosted at Yale-NUS College, it was also a great chance to help showcase some of the modest astronomical capabilities of Yale-NUS. This includes no only our mighty 0.12-meter telescope and a pair of binoculars, but the Yale 1.3-meter telescope at CTIO and the Carnegie Science LCRO telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, both of which we have been using in our Observational Astronomy course at Yale-NUS College.

One key takeaway from this talk for me was the astounding energy of the gravitational wave sources discovered by LIGO. Based on their reported data, 3 solar masses of black hole mass were radiated away from the merger of the two black holes within the LIGO GW150914 event, which created a huge black hole over 60 solar masses in size. The energy released by merging the 25 and 37 solar mass black hole exceeds the energy radiated by the most luminous known objects in the universe, the quasar, by a factor of a trillion!  The chart of black holes merging and detected by LIGO is shown below (taken from the Caltech press release of Feb 2017), and a diagram showing the range of cosmic explosions is also shown below. Both of these figures were included in my “Chasing Cosmic Explosions” talk along with the background astrophysics of stars, supernovae, gamma ray bursts, and gravitational waves. What an amazing time we live in to have all of these discoveries to study and talk about!

screenshot_3724

 

screenshot_3723

Visit to IIT Gandhinagar and Sudhair Jain

During my visit to Ahmedabad, I was able to visit the visionary Vice Chancellor of IIT Gandhinagar, Sudhair Jain, and learn more about his very interesting campus and its programs. Sudhair was incredibly friendly to me – as I had just arrived without an appointment. Despite the sudden appearance, he warmly welcomed me and my colleague Alicia Contractor, and we discussed many of his new programs in detail in his office over tea.

screenshot_1232  screenshot_1236  screenshot_1234 screenshot_1233

Sudhair has implemented a wonderful “Foundation Program” for incoming IIT students. The foundation program takes students fresh from their high-pressure high schools, and helps them both unlearn the frantic test-taking mentality that is endemic with IIT admissions, and to learn more about themselves, their context within the society of India, and the larger dimensions of knowledge – including arts, culture and sports.

I first learned about this program from my friends Brian Brophy (a theatre professor from Caltech) and Srini Reddy ( a music professor at IIT Gh). They together taught in the program a couple of years ago, and had students performing music, acting, and exploring the region around the IIT Gh campus.  As Srini described it, he would ask his students – “what do you think?” and “what do you feel about this?” and often would receive blank stares back. He joked that students often are under the impression that they are not supposed to think and feel – and the Foundations Program helps them do both.

The goals for the Foundations Program according to the web site include:

  • Values and Ethics: Focus on fostering a strong sense of ethical judgment and moral fortitude.
  • Creativity: Provide channels to exhibit and develop individual creativity by expressing themselves through art, craft, music, singing, media, dramatics, and other creative activities.
  • Leadership, Communication and Teamwork: Develop a culture of teamwork and group communication.
  • Social Awareness: Nurture a deeper understanding of the local and global world and our place in at as concerned citizens of the world.
  • Physical Activities & Sports: Engage students in sports and physical activity to ensure healthy physical and mental growth.

Sudhair described some new programs he is introducing that go beyond the Foundation program. This includes an IIT Gh Explorers Fellowship program, which gives students a small grant to visit at least “6 states in 6 weeks” – traveling inexpensively, using non-AC trains and busses to see the country of India in depth. Some of the students are able to visit many more states, and in the process they are able to become more aware of life across India to help them become more effective as leaders and as engineers.  In a blog posting from Manaal Bhombal, Sudhair Jain describes the goals of the program:

“The fellowship is not just to give students a taste of adventure, it is to engulf them with ground level realities of our country.” When asked about how would it help students in their engineering career, he said, “As an engineer, students should model their innovations around simplifying the travails of the less privileged.”

To provide further experiences for students, Sudhair is also working on a program where they would live in a village for the summer – not to be “saviours” but to just live and learn with the people in the village to understand their concerns and life. This is also helpful, according to Sudhair, for developing graduates who can then take their education and give back to India and understand the human dimensions of science and technology.

I noticed that the blue skies above IIT Gandhinagar portended good astronomy, and I suggested to Sudhair that he should consider developing his astronomy capabilities at IIT Gh – a project I might be interested in helping with!

 

screenshot_1237screenshot_1235screenshot_1238