The Astronomy Winter School in India, or Astrowin, was held in Hyderabad, India, on February 20-23, 2017. This was the second in a series of schools, the first of which was held in February 2016, in Agra, India. The Astrowin events are actually a combination training school for Bachelors and Masters degree level students, a research workshop, and a cultural experience. Accessibility to participants from diverse backgrounds is a founding principle of the schools. The diversity of the school reached new heights in 2017, with a fully gender-balanced participant list and 11 different countries
represented by the students and speakers. These countries were Bangladesh, Canada, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nepal, Philippines, the UAE, and the USA. The largest contingent among the 70 students was from India, followed by Canada. The Indian students also represented the length and breadth of the subcontinent, from Maharashtra to Manipur, and Punjab to Tamil Nadu. The 2016 school had been sponsored by generous funding from Anand College, Agra, India, and Western University, Canada. In 2017 the school was funded by the International Astronomical Union – Office of Astronomy for Development (IAU-OAD), giving it a greater international profile. The event was held at the B M Birla Science Centre in Hyderabad, and many thanks go to its Director, Dr. B. G. Sidharth.
Deepakshi Madaan leads the hands on session on the stellar initial mass function.Henry Throop engages with the audience.
The school segment of the event featured two hands-on astronomy sessions. Priya Shah Hasan (Maulana Azad National Urdu University, India) led an interactive session on GAIA telescope data analysis, and Sayantan Auddy and Deepakshi Madaan of Western University teamed up to lead a workshop on the use of the Python programming language with an application to measuring the mass function of stars in a stellar cluster. Other school highlights included Henry Throop (Planetary Science Institute, USA) speaking on the New Horizons mission to Pluto, Pranav Manangath (Western) speaking on the Theory of Planet Formation, Pranawa Deshmukh (IIT-Tirupati) speaking on Precession of Planetary Orbits in General
Relativity, Ajith Parameswaran (ICTS Bangalore) on Binary Black Hole Detection by LIGO, and Tapas Das (HRI Allahabad) speaking on Accretion onto Supermassive Black Holes.
A slide from Mousumi Das’s talk on extragalactic star formation.
The final day was a research workshop on various aspects of stellar clusters and star formation, where students experienced a research presentation environment, with plenty of opportunity to interact with the speakers. In addition to talks by many of the school lecturers, there were several invited talks including by Mousumi Das (IIA Bangalore), Manoj Puravankara (TIFR Mumbai), and Margarita Safonova (IIA Bangalore).
All relaxed at the banquet.
A special feature of the Astrowin series is simply bringing a diverse group of people together and letting them interact. Relationships are developed and cross-cultural awareness is gained. On the second day, there was a group excursion to the historic Golconda Fort, located just outside Hyderabad and overlooking the city. The fort dates back to about the 12th century and has been in use by many successive dynasties. In recent centuries its international fame had come from its association with nearby diamond mines that yielded the largest and most famous diamonds in the world, notably the Koh-i-Noor diamond and the Hope diamond. Participants made the trek to the top of the hill while developing fellowship with each other, and the group stayed till the evening light show. Another part of the school was a panel discussion on careers in astronomy, with students asking very frank questions about what it takes to get a PhD position, and a conversation about the international nature of astronomy research.
The panel discussion addressing careers in astronomy.
Astrowin provided an opportunity for education, travel, and cross-cultural interaction. It allowed Canadian students (from Western University, Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Toronto) to meet international students in a study abroad event while experiencing India. For Indian students and those from other Asian countries, it provided a valuable opportunity to interact with leading scientists from many countries in a relaxed and inquisitive environment. The very large number of applicants for the Astrowin schools means that there is a strong demand for these kind of events and surely there will be more to come.
The group at Golconda Fort. Pranava Sharma holds the selfie stick!A view of Hyderabad from the opulent Taj Falaknuma Palace, residence of the former Nizam of Hyderabad.
This summer the Department is hosting three international interns who have come to Canada through the Mitacs Globalink Research Internship program. These students are Abhishek Chaudhary, working with Prof. Giovanni Fanchini, Shyam Menon, working with Prof. Shantanu Basu, and Xiyang Zhang, working with Prof. Sree Ram Valluri.
Left to right: Abhishek Chaudhary, Xiyang Zhang, Shyam Menon.
The Mitacs Globalink Research Internship program is a competitive program for international students from selected countries, currently Australia, Brazil, China, France, India, Germany, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Ukraine. After a detailed process run by Mitacs, selected top-ranked applicants participate in a 12-week research internship under the supervision of a Canadian university faculty member.
Abhishek Chaudhary is currently pursuing a Masters degree in Engineering Physics at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. He is also funded by the German DAAD exchange program. According to Abhishek, “Being a Mitacs intern at Western University has been a very delightful and educational experience for me. My colleagues and supervisor Prof. Fanchini have been very helpful and supportive. I am also thankful for being allowed a certain degree of freedom to structure my internship as per my interests in graphene based solar cells. This research internship has further solidified my interest to pursue a PhD in semiconductor physics.”
Shyam Menon is pursuing a combined Bachelors-Masters degree in Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Varanasi, India. Here he is running large-scale three-dimensional simulations of star formation, stating that “The experience has given me a lot of really good exposure to what it’s like to do research.There’s a lot of good research coming out of Canada now, especially here at Western. In fact, I am thinking about research as a career and doing graduate school in Canada. I would love to come back!”
Xiyang Zhang is an undergraduate student majoring in Statistics in the College of Mathematics, Sichuan University, China. He relates that “I seized an opportunity offered by Mitacs, starting my research project about data mining of gravitational wave data at Western. Here, a kindness toward multiculturalism and a strong academic atmosphere attract me deeply, facilitating my work tremendously.”
These three students are but the latest in a rich history of international interns in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Western. There have been about ten Mitacs intern students in the Department in the last five years, and many others funded by other programs like the German DAAD, the Ontario/Baden-Wuerttemberg exchange program and the Ontario-India exchange program. In the Department, we hope to provide a positive experience of research and all-around support so that these students can pave the way for more exchange students in the future. These students can directly assess for themselves the merits of returning to Western for graduate studies. To this effect, the Mitacs students are also eligible for a Globalink Graduate Fellowship if they intend to return to Canada for graduate studies.
Earlier this year I visited the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and spent part of my time there as a visitor at Sharjah University. Sharjah is one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE. I also visited the more well known emirate of Dubai. This was a very enlightening trip for me to a part of the world I had never visited before, and I found many opportunities emerging there.
I was a guest of the Department of Applied Physics (now renamed to Department of Applied Physics and Astronomy – more on that later). Sharjah has historically been a hub for education in the UAE, and one cannot help but be in awe of the sprawling campuses and imposing white arabesque architecture of Sharjah University and the neighboring American University of Sharjah.
Sharjah UniversityAmerican University of Sharjah
Hospitality to guests is an important part of the culture in this part of the world and I truly appreciated the warm greetings from a wide range of people, including Dean of Science Dr. Majid Merabti, Chair of Applied Physics Dr. Gaffar Attaelmanan, and many other faculty and some very eager students. Dr. Merabti highlighted how Sharjah University is trying to make the transition to a research intensive university. The highlight of my stay was to visit the newly built and sparkling Sharjah Center for Astronomy and Space Sciences, which houses a planetarium and space science museum. I was hosted by its Manager Dr. Ilias Fernini and gave a public lecture on The Life and Death of Stars. This was a first-time experience for me in two ways – I was speaking inside a planetarium with my slides projected onto a side of the dome, and my talk was being translated in real time as I spoke! The translation into Arabic was done very ably by the Planetarium Manager Marwan Shwaiki. About half the audience was listening to me directly and the other half had headphones and listened to Marwan’s translation. I also learned that many of the faculty and staff members are in the UAE on work visas and originate from other countries. I met faculty members from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Sudan, and even…Canada! There are several citizens or PR holders of Canada amongst the faculty members.
The Sharjah Center for Astronomy and Space SciencesThe replica moon lander outside SCASS looks eerily at home on a desert landscape
I toured the Advanced Material Research Laboratory, which is available for 4th year physics undergraduate students and houses an x-ray diffraction system, a scanning electron microscope, and a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer. Quite impressive, and I wish we could offer equivalent instructional facilities at Western University. But why is there a space science museum and planetarium? The answer seems to lie with a major new initiative in the UAE: the Emirates Mars Mission. I have to admit I had not heard about this before my visit. The Sheikhs of the UAE have decided that they would like to send a Mars orbiter that will arrive at the Red Planet in 2021, to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the UAE. The scientific value added in this mission is the plan to make the most extensive map of the Martian atmosphere and to track weather on the Red Planet. This initiative has led to a surge in engineering and aerospace activity and also an interest in funding both space science and astronomy research. The planetarium is but one manifestation of this new focus. Even the Department of Applied Physics at Sharjah University has now added Astronomy to its department name. New faculty positions are to come. New research funding opportunities are available for those who can make the right connections, and basic astronomy research is also being funded. It’s a wise decision for foreign researchers to see if they can collaborate with UAE scientists for mutual benefit. Furthermore, there are additional opportunities in the region. Next door to UAE there are impressive funds available through the Qatar Foundation, and Saudi Arabia is dramatically increasing funding of higher education and science and technology research, evidenced by the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology.
I spent a few days in Dubai, which is now one of the world’s great multicultural hubs, with a large expatriate population that significantly outnumbers the local population. Walking around the city center amongst gleaming skyscrapers one can hear a multitude of languages, e.g., Arabic, Bengali, English, French, German, Hindi, Malayalam, Russian, Tagalog, or Urdu. People seem to be enjoying themselves with extensive options for shopping, dining out, and nightlife. Some but not all restaurants have liquor licenses. Men and women seem to dress as they might back in their home countries and women drivers are a common sight, unlike in neighboring Saudi Arabia. Enjoying the temperate February evening breeze at an outdoor cafe by the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, I was experiencing something completely new. I could order a meal in Bengali while sitting under skyscrapers on a riverfront resembling Chicago, and watch a night fountain and light show set to iconic American themes like the soundtrack of The Magnificent Seven and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Gasp, there was even an outlet of Tim Hortons nearby. I was getting confused about where I was. But wait, this is exactly the uniqueness of the UAE experience! Wherever you are from, you may find a bit of your background here, and learn about that of others, with Arabia as your backdrop.
Although I also spent part of my leave year at powerhouse places like Harvard and JPL/Caltech, and organized a winter school in India, this may be the most interesting story to share, for its novelty to many readers and at a time when when much of the news reporting from west Asia (yes, that’s preferable to a colonially inspired name like middle East) focuses on the grim events happening in other countries in the region.
The UAE has come a very long way in just half a century, from a sleepy outpost for date-growing and pearl-diving in the hottest part of the Arabian penisula where few people wanted to live, to a gleaming (and highly air-conditioned) center of international commerce. Some eighty-five percent of people in the UAE are foreigners living on work visas. The world has literally come to the UAE, from the armies of workers who power the construction and service industries, to the businesspeople looking to make their fortune, to those who have already made a fortune elsewhere and are enjoying the lifestyle here. The world is dealing with many effects of globalization, both good and bad, and a more complete perspective on global affairs can be obtained by visiting the unique hub that is the UAE. An interesting read on the history and current situation there can be found in the book Dubai, The Story of the World’s Fastest City, by Jim Krane, which takes a critical look at both the successes and the problems of the emirate. The UAE is now becoming an education hub for students from across Asia, and it wants to foster major engineering/science projects like the Mars Mission. It will be very interesting to track the UAE’s progress in these areas in the next decade and beyond.
The Burj Khalifa lit up at nightTim Hortons in Dubai, where you can order cardamom chai
Situated on the banks of the Yamuna River, Agra, India is a former capital city of the Mughal Empire. Millions of tourists visit the city yearly in order to see monuments like the Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri palace complex, and the famed marble mausoleum known as Taj Mahal. During February 15-19, 2016, Agra also hosted a unique educational and cultural event, known informally as “Astronomy at Taj”. This was a joint effort between Anand Engineering College, Agra, and Western University of London, Canada.
This unconventional event combined several initiatives. It was an educational event, as a winter school in astronomy for college undergraduate students. It was also a focused research workshop in star formation research with speakers from six countries. Finally, it represented a cultural exchange and interaction between students from India and Canada. For Canadian students it represented a valuable study abroad opportunity organized by Western University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, and conveniently occurring during Reading Week at Western. Another goal was to bring astronomy and science awareness to the general public in Agra.
About 65 students from India participated in the school, representing the vast range of the country, from Jammu and Punjab in the north, Gujarat and Maharashtra in the west, Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south, and West Bengal to the east. There were 12 delegates from Western, plus their friends and spouses. There were 8 Canadian students at the event, which was open to students from all disciplines as long as they had an interest in astronomy, and these included Western students enrolled in Astronomy, Physics, Anthropology, Engineering, English, and Political Science programs. One student from Indonesia also made an admirable effort and attended the school. The 40% female student participation rate was higher than the typical North American average for Physics or Astronomy undergraduate programs. There were ten internationally renowned invited speakers, from India, Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, and the USA. The organizing committee consisted of Prof. Shantanu Basu (Western), Pranav Sharma (Anand College), Prof. Priya Shah Hasan (MANUU, India), and Western graduate students Sayantan Auddy, Mark Baker, and Pranav Manangath from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Deepakshi Madaan from the Department of Applied Mathematics. The Director of Anand College, Prof. Anil Kishore Saxena, and the Dean-Academics of Anand College, Prof. Amit Sharma, also contributed immensely to the support and organization of the event.
Local media coverage of the opening ceremony
From the start, the event combined fellowship with science, exhibiting Indian hospitality and exuberance. The official opening saw the traditional Indian lamp lighting ceremony, and a beautiful exposition of the Indian traditional dance form Mohiniattam, by renowned dancer Vijayalakshmi. Prof. Anil Kishore Saxena pointed out that he was supporting the event because it would allow his students to diversify their learning, examine new career options, and broaden their contacts. Prof. Shantanu Basu pointed out that Astronomy at Taj had gone from conception to execution in a mere four months time. The opening research workshop talks highlighted the role of new global observatories Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Herschel Space Observatory in revealing the initial conditions of star formation. The winter school participants heard lectures about the recent NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto, the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the search for its existence. In this context, the first day also saw the screening of the 1997 movie Contact, based on a novel by Carl Sagan. This movie led to an open discussion the following day on both the accurate and inaccurate portrayals of science in the movie, as well as important issues touched on in the movie, such as the position of women in astronomy, the relationship between religion and science, and the efficacy of doing conventional versus unconventional science. The opening day also saw a keynote talk by science journalist Biman Basu on “Indian contributions in shaping astronomy and astrophysics”, which expounded on ancient as well as more recent Indian contributions, with very interesting insights like the development of the Indian calendar that incorporates both lunar and solar cycles.
Chaitanya Afle and Mark Baker give a joint talk.
The second day witnessed a slew of science talks at the star formation workshop, as well as talks in the winter school about relativity and the recent detection of gravitational waves. The latter was an excellent collaborative effort led by an Indian and a Canadian student. There was also a special session for hundreds of students from local public schools in Agra. The workshop talks illustrated the fast moving nature of research, with results presented about the masses of stars. New results showed that the mass distribution of stars in clusters can vary significantly from one to the other, and particularly in the low mass end of the distribution. A constant universal distribution of stellar masses was definitely not favored by workshop participants and their data. This variability was also true for the mass distribution of prestellar cores, the precursors of stars, as seen with new ALMA data. Student talks also illustrated new approaches to characterizing the stellar mass function, and also a prediction for the numbers of very low luminosity stars, still undetected, that may exist throughout our Galaxy.
On the second evening, the conference participants shifted from Anand College to the public lecture hall Sur Sadan in Agra city, for a public event with Agra citizens. The evening got off to a rocking start with a series of Indian dance performances representative of many different regions of India. All performers were students of Anand College, part of a very talented student body indeed! This was followed by the main event, a public lecture on the new global observatory the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), by Prof. Devendra Ojha of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai. India has recently joined the consortium as a partner, alongside Canada, China, and Japan, as well as Caltech and the University of California. Following the public lecture was a panel discussion on the subject “Are we Alone in the Universe?”, moderated by Mr. Pranav Sharma of Anand College, with panelists Prof.’s Shantanu Basu and Chris Essex from Western, Prof.’s Priya Hasan and Najam Hasan from MANUU, India, Dr. Doug Johnstone from NRC, Victoria, Canada, and Dr. Henry Throop from Planetary Science Institute, USA. Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? If so, where? Why have we not found it yet or why has it not yet found us? Questions were taken from many of the several hundred attendees of the Agra citizenry, and a freewheeling discussion ensued. Prof. Najam Hasan also summarized the discussion in Hindi.
The cultural program ended with the enthralling Holi dance featuring Lord Krishna and gopis. Click on image for video.
The third day was spent entirely outdoors, at one of the world’s most spectacular settings. The morning session took place at the Taj Nature Walk, a short distance from the Taj Mahal, and with a majestic view of the Taj from a hilltop. The Archaeological Survey of India had granted special permission to hold the event at this protected location. In the marvelous surroundings, a group discussion took place about careers in astronomy while a solar telescope was set up to view the sun and its sunspots (only one visible that day). The wide-ranging discussion dealt with very practical questions from students about strategies to get accepted into graduate Astronomy programs both in India and in Europe and North America. With free interaction and the presence of so many senior astronomers from many countries available to comment, many students found this to be one of the most valuable sessions of the winter school. The afternoon was reserved for a tour of the Taj Mahal, and participants made the most of the many hours on a beautiful sunny day to view the Taj from many angles, each one spectacular in its own way, to go inside, and to enhance fellowship with their fellow participants. Back at Anand College in the evening, there was outdoor night sky viewing with an 8-inch Celestron telescope, as well as a session on astrophotography hosted by filmmaker and astronomy enthusiast Rakesh Rao.
The fourth day saw more workshop talks in the morning, on planet formation and time variability in stellar mass accumulation. The afternoon was spent on a tour of the famed palatial complex at Fatehpur Sikri, home of Mughal emperor Akbar and his wives. Participants got a view of the complex architecture that combined Persian and Indian elements, the palaces of the emperor and queens, and the awe-inspiring 55 m tall gateway, the Buland Darwaza. As the week drew to a close, the participants had bonded well with each other. Many experiences had been shared, including communal meals at the Anand College cafeteria. Freshly-made delicious North Indian vegetarian food was served each day, and this was itself another cultural experience for the Canadian students. The last evening was spent socializing around a communal bonfire. An impromptu soccer match also broke out, utilizing the large sports arena of Anand College. By the time the last day arrived, emotions were running high as students, professors, and Anand College volunteers and staff all realized how much they had bonded together, but that they would soon be going their separate ways. This event required that approximately 100 people, including the Anand College volunteers and staff, lived together and shared learning and cultural experiences for a week. Many new friendships were forged, that span the breadth of India as well as Canada to India. There is no underestimating the camaraderie that was established, and the age of social media means that these ties will be maintained and nurtured. The closing ceremony saw an open microphone session where participants spoke from the heart about their experience and how it had changed them. The overwhelming conclusion was: this was a wonderful idea and event, and let’s do it again!
Canadian and other international delegates also spent the day before or after the conference touring Delhi. Sites like the Akshardham temple, Humayun’s Tomb, Jantar Mantar (ancient astronomical observatory), and Red Fort were visited, along with much shopping at Connaught Place.
The Nobel Physics Prize for 2012 will be announced tomorrow, Oct 9. You will likely wake up to hear the news. Meantime, if you have time to kill on Thanksgiving, give this article from Slate magazine a read. It analyzes and speculates on potential winners in Physics and other categories. I note two Canadians on the Physics speculation list!
Very interesting article in Nature. I never liked the explanation of the uncertainty principle that relied on disturbing the system. So here it is, someone has tested that interpretation and found it lacking.
This is great for popularizing and promoting physics, and rather ironic that the money comes from someone who dropped out of physics grad school and then made a fortune investing in the internet.
I’ve been asked this question a lot as our exoplanet faculty search ran its course this winter and spring. God forbid a potential exoplanet find may actually turn out to be a brown dwarf! But why the distinction? There is a case to be made that any object that cannot initiate internal hydrogen fusion is a planet, period. BDs would then just be planets on the more massive end of the spectrum. On the other hand, some prefer to think that BDs should be thought of as more like stars since they have a similar formation mechanism. But do they? Increasingly the evidence is that BDs can form both in a star-like manner as well as through physical processes in a circumstellar disk, where planets are also formed. Should BDs be preserved as a separate third category of object? Perhaps, since they seem able to form both through disk processes and direct collapse of interstellar cloud fragments. Planets may be defined as objects that form only through an initial accumulation of solids in circumstellar disks. Stars form in all the same ways as BDs but can be distinguished from them by having a high enough internal temperature to initiate hydrogen fusion.
I was asked to write an article in Science magazine about some of these matters, and it just appeared in the July 6 issue:
Nice to see a range of media articles appearing on our brown dwarf formation model. I am learning from these articles how to better use flowery descriptive language! Here’s a couple of the more interesting articles:
By the time the last day arrived, emotions were running high as students, professors, and Anand College volunteers and staff all realized how much they had bonded together, but that they would soon be going their separate ways. This event required that approximately 100 people, including the Anand College volunteers and staff, lived together and shared learning and cultural experiences for a week. Many new friendships were forged, that span the breadth of India as well as Canada to India. There is no underestimating the camaraderie that was established, and the age of social media means that these ties will be maintained and nurtured. The closing ceremony saw an open microphone session where participants spoke from the heart about their experience and how it had changed them. The overwhelming conclusion was: this was a wonderful idea and event, and let’s do it again!
