As usual, PhD Comics has it about right. In my January and February posts, I tried to describe a little about what the teaching and research parts of the job entail. But service is even more nebulous — what does it mean? [Generally no tennis or badminton is involved.]

Part of service is doing things for the benefit of the Department or University. So this might mean being a member of committee that selects scholarship recipients, in which case one reads a lot of application forms, tries to rank the applicants, and then goes to a meeting in which the committee comes to a consensus. Or it might mean being on a committee which is deciding on changes to the curriculum — again, doing some background reading and then going to a meeting where things get discussed. Service also includes things like being a member of the University Senate (I suspect meetings are also involved here) or a department chair or Dean (again, meetings, probably also paperwork).

Another kind of service would be service to one’s scientific community. This would include things like peer review of papers, grant applications, or (for astronomers) telescope time applications. There are two kinds of review here: in one type, the reviewer sees only one paper/application and does a detailed check for sensibility and worthiness. In the other kind, more like the scholarship application, the reviewer sees a whole bunch of applications and has to rank them relative to each other. These are somewhat different and it can take time to switch one’s mindset from one to the other. Other things that qualify as service to one’s profession might include organizing conferences, helping to run a professional society like the Canadian Astronomical Society, or being an outside reviewer of another university’s department or program.

Finally, there is service to the wider community: being a judge at a science fair, giving a public talk, visiting a school to talk about your field, answering questions from the public on a website. Different fields vary in how important this is considered to be: in astronomy, because we use taxpayers’ money to do something which (some would say) doesn’t have immediate economic value, most of us consider outreach to be extremely important. Plus we think we get to do fantastic stuff and we love to tell people about it! Admittedly it helps that many people are interested in our field, moreso than in others, like (say) actuarial science.

So that’s academic service from my point of view. As I have to keep explaining to my Mom, we don’t get paid extra for this; it’s part of the job. How big a part? I refer you to the eloquent statement by Jorge Cham — it’s supposed to be 20% of one’s time, and if you can accomplish it by not actually spending any time on it (see middle chart), so much the better.

I just learned that there’s a possible (but nearly certain) supernova on the rise in the relatively nearby spiral galaxy M95. This is exciting, because it should get bright enough to spot in small telescopes! By coincidence, Mars happens to be sitting in the sky very close to the location of M95; that makes it easier to find in that you have an obvious landmark in the sky, but tougher because Mars is so close and so bright it swamps the region with light!

Right now, the supernova is still at roughly 12th magnitude, making it too faint to see without bigger ‘scopes, or smaller ones with digital cameras. However, it was only discovered on March 16, so it’s most likely going to get brighter. The galaxy itself is about magnitude 9 or 10, so the supernova may get that bright.

There are quite a few pictures of the galaxy+supernova on Flickr, but most are copyrighted aren’t free license so I can’t post them here. However, searching the site for “M95 supernova” yielded a few of them. You can also find a list of links here. I think this one in particular is cool; it has bright lines going across that’s scattered light from nearby Mars!

However, by a funny coincidence (?), the European Southern Observatory chose a Very Large Telescope image of M95 as its Picture of the Week just this morning:

[Click to galactinate.]

I say it’s a coincidence because there’s no mention of the supernova in the caption. Anyway, M95 is a gorgeous barred ring spiral: the bar is the rectangular feature in the middle, and the ring around it of gas and stars is not uncommon in galaxies (like here and here). M95 is about 35-40 million light years away, and is part of a small group of a couple of dozen galaxies called the Leo I group. M96, another spiral in the group, is even prettier!

Back to the supernova, DeepSkyVideos put together a very quick-and-dirty video about it which manages to be very informative and good despite being put up so quickly:

If you have a good telescope and detector, the coordinates of the supernova are online. Astrobob has a good finder chart for it. I’ll note that observations right now are critical; the physics of the explosion are best characterized by how rapidly it brightens. At this point, we don’t even know if it’s a Type I or Type II! So observe it if you can. And if you take good pictures or see any online that are not copyrighted freely licensed, please let me know!

And as a final note for now: we’re in no danger from this. I normally wouldn’t bother writing that, but a lot of people seem jittery due to 1) the 2012 nonsense, b) the recent (coincidental) solar flares, and γ) the asteroids (DA14 and AG5) I wrote about last week. So to proclude any fear-mongering, I’ll just say this supernova is something like 400 million trillion kilometers away, and probably won’t even get bright enough to see in binoculars. I hope that helps assuage any fears.

Image credit: ESO

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March 19th, 2012 6:31 PM Tags: M95, supernova
by Phil Plait in Astronomy, Pretty pictures | 27 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

Lots of good info and links on the Bad Astronomer’s blog