Category Archives: Outreach

Two PGRs win prizes for their scientific community service and outreach

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The “EuCAPT Outstanding contributor” prize was awarded to Newcastle postgraduate researcher, Niko Sarcevic, during the First EuCAPT Annual Symposium. EuCAPT (European Consortium for Astroparticle Theory) is an organization with a goal of bringing together the European astroparticle and cosmology community. EuCAPT was established in 2019, with Gianfranco Bertone as a director and coordination from CERN. EuCAPT has over 600 members (2019 census).

“I joined EuCAPT as a junior contributor in the fall of 2020. I have been working closely with Gianfranco Bertone (GRAPPA) and David Marsh (Stockholm) on developing new ways of bringing the EuCAPT community together. An example of such an initiative is a new feature on the EuCAPT blog called “Community profiles” which is a weekly interview with a member of the community. Another example of my contribution is creating and hosting a  HEP-ASTRO-COSMO GitHub repository where all the open source code in the field of astroparticle, particle physics and cosmology is collected. Lastly, one of the campaigns resulted in the interactive community map featured on the EuCAPT home page. A similar code, publicly available, can be found on my website.”

The “Postgraduate Prize for Outreach” was awarded by the Newcastle School of Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics to Alex Gough. This prize was awarded for Alex’s contributions to the Astrobites collaboration and their public outreach talk to the Newcastle Astronomical Society about cosmology.

The Astrobites collaboration is an international group of masters and PhD students who write accessible summaries of current astrophysics research papers, as well as specialist “Beyond” posts about DEI problems in astronomy, mental health in academia, what the day-to-day life in astronomy looks like, and application processes and career advice. Contributing authors write approximately one article per month, along with helping edit other authors’ articles. 

“I’ve been reading Astrobites articles since I was in school, and getting to help contribute to the collaboration has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I think the ‘daily bites’, which make up the backbone of Astrobites provide a much needed niche in scientific literacy, helping aid undergraduate students in learning how to examine actual research articles. I’m excited to help contribute to some of the Beyond topics that Astrobites has become more focused on in recent years, especially concerning equity issues in astronomy and physics. You can read my current articles or find out about other things I do on my website.”

EDI: Aishwarya Girdhar featured as “Physicist of the week” (German Physical Society)

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Aishwarya Girdhar at La Silla Observatory

Our Ph.D. student, Aishwarya Girdhar was featured as the “Physicist of the week” by The Working Group for Equal Opportunities (AKC) of the German Physical Society (DPG) in the 52nd week of 2020. Aish is a second-year Ph.D. student at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in Garching, Munich, and is jointly supervised by Dr. Chris Harrison at Newcastle University and Dr. Vincenzo Mainieri at the European Southern Observatory.

Through the Physicist of the week project, The AKC aims to improve the framework conditions for female physicists, to strengthen them and to network them by increasing the visibility of outstanding female scientists at all career stages. To read the full feature, please visit the following links:
https://www.dpg-physik.de/vereinigungen/fachuebergreifend/ak/akc/publikationen/physikerin-der-woche/physikerin-der-woche-2020
https://twitter.com/physikerinnen/status/1341219911687913473
https://www.instagram.com/p/CJFa2pAsgP7/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
https://www.facebook.com/Physikerinnen/photos/a.1740315012922405/3047572362196657/

Outreach: New Astrobites Author

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Alex will begin writing for Astrobites starting in 2021. The Astrobites collaboration is a group of astronomy and astrophysics graduate students around the world who write daily summaries of recent astrophysics research, accessible to the undergraduate level. These “daily summary posts” have made up the backbone of Astrobites over the last 10 years, and in more recent years they have begun to also write about things beyond daily summaries, including series of posts about DEI problems in astronomy, mental health in academia, what the day-to-day life in astronomy looks like, and application processes and career advice.

Outreach: Public talk for Astronomical Society

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Remote outreach talk to the Newcastle Astronomical Society, given by Alex Gough

The Skeleton of Our Universe

The goal of this talk is to introduce the topic of my research, understanding the largest structures in the universe, to the members of the Newcastle Astronomical Society. This begins by setting the stage for where cosmology takes place, and winding back the cosmic clock to the early universe and the cosmic microwave background (CMB). From there, understanding that the very early universe is nearly the same everywhere, with only 10 parts per million deviation from the mean density, it becomes an obvious scientific question to understand how those tiny fluctuations grow into the rich structure of galaxies we see today. Understanding this growth, and the role dark matter has to play in it, is the focus of my research.

After touring through the history of the universe, we take a detour into understanding how these huge distances and times are actually measured. This detour provides a link from my work in cosmology to the stellar physics and observations that members of an astronomical society are more familiar with. It also provides a nice opportunity to look at beautiful space pictures.

The end point of the talk is the 6 numbers one needs to measure to construct the universe. These are based on the 6 parameters in ΛCDM (the standard cosmological model), slightly modified to make them more accessible to this general audience. These break down into:

  • 2 numbers from the early universe: the amplitude and scale dependence of the fluctuations in the CMB
  • 2 numbers for the “pie recipe” of the universe: how much dark energy and dark matter do we have
  • 2 timescales for the universe: the age of the universe, and the time you have to wait for the first stars to form.

Outreach: Creation of blind-accessible planetarium show

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Chris has been awarded public engagement grants from STFC and the Royal Astronomical Society to make a planetarium show and educational resources that are accessible to blind and vision impaired children. This build on a pilot project done last year at the British Science Festival in collaboration with blind astronomer Dr Nic Bonne. Uniquely, the planetarium show will use sounds and narration as the main methods of communication, with visuals acting as a secondary mode of communication. When COVID-19 restrictions are relaxed we will regularly visit our partner schools to also co-develop BVI-accessible classroom based activities around the subject of astronomy that use both sounds and tactile models. Here you can listen to a little taster of the soundtrack below and see a photograph of some of the tactile models.

A montage of astronomical pictures and photographs of the 3D "tactile" versions of these created with a 3D printer.
The 3D models showcased in this montage were created by Nicolas Bonne for A Dark Tour of the Universe, an astronomy show for the blind and visually impaired. Image Credit: ESO/M. Zamani, Nicolas Bonne, S. Brunier, TRAPPIST/ E. Jehin, EHT Collaboration, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Millennium Simulation Project, NASA/ Goddard/ SDO, WMAP Science Team