IAU tidbits (1)

Concrete recommendations to develop astronomy in an emerging country. Fellowships and lots of outreach.

Bottom-line: invest in people

Source: I. Ramírez, The impact of IAU educational programs on Peruvian astronomy, SpS4

The IAU internet access in a screenshot

Malkov: Survey (opinion poll) in Russia about the future of astronomy

3 groups of people were asked to rate predictions on astronomical discoveries:
Science Journalists, Professional Astronomers, and Amateur Astronomers.

Here are some snippets of people’s predictions

Unlikely: discovery of a new planet in our solar system

Next few years (likelihood in brackets): astronomy on the curriculum 81%, samples of soil returned to earth from mars 100%

Late 2020s: nature of gamma Ray bursts understood

2030s: detected gravitational waves, regular commercial space flight, nature of dark matter unraveled

Late 2040s: Permanent observatory on the moon, Dark energy understood

2060s: space tourism industry, Saturn atmosphere sample collected and brought back to Earth, use of extraterrestrial raw materials

End of XXIst century: 50% solar energy, public transportation Earth-Moon

2170: contact with extraterrestrial life forms :)

The difficulty of each question evaluated by the number of experts replying ‘i don’t know’

Amateurs’ predictions are more pessimistic than experts’ predictions

According to amateurs a Tunguska event will happen before we have an Earth collision protection system. Oops :)

Malkov’s final comment: this is very subjective but it is the best we can propose today…

Kissler-Patig on huge optical telescopes of the future: JWST, GMT, TMT, E-ELT

Note to self: I must read Martin Harwit’s work on astronomical discoveries

When you are looking for something you either look elsewhere or you look harder. Extremely large telescopes are of the look harder kind.

Most exciting prospects of the ELTs?
- Study of exoplanets
- Tests of fundamental physics (varying fundamental constants?)

Limitations:
- Price tag (approaching the order of magnitude of space missions)
- Availability (less observing time)
- Versatility (fewer instruments on each instrument)

Open question: should time be given as small chunks of time?

Small projects allow more diversity, risk, opportunity… Big projects needed to address big questions. How to balance the two?

About observing time allocation: there could be annual deadlines for big projects & continuous open observing proposals for small projects? (like HST)

Another tradeoff: multipurpose vs specialised instruments

The price tag is an additional factors in balancing the various tradeoffs. Therefore we need to rethink our operating modes.

Personal comment: It looks like big telescope management needs a Think different approach :)

He had a cool slide putting the E-ELT in front of the great pyramids in Egypt. His comment was to show that we have built bigger things with lower technology before :)

Andrew Hopkins on astronomy after SKA

An entertaining talk pushing the limits of the foreseeable & making conjectures on astronomy in 2035.

With shameless Star Trek references. Who can blame him? :)

Hopkins begins by showing a ship called Entreprise discovering a beautiful star-forming nebula instantly analysed by a computer with a suave voice.

Hopkins takes us to 2035 it’s awesome sci-fi, but all based on proposed scientific experiments.

In 2035 99% of research is based on archived data.

Hopkins quotes xkcd on string theory :)

State of astronomy in 2035:
- facilities have solved today’s fundamental questions
- so much data and archives!
- hard to recruit students to work on instruments because they disappear in consortia of thousands and don’t get science publications out of it
- the community is split into data miners, data takers and theorists
- What are the rewards for the instrumentalists? Beware of breaking the instrument building cycle
- Cross matching between archived data and tools for data access and analysis are needed
- We need to train students to devise clever archival infrastructure (soft- and hardware) & tools (software)(*)

(*) This reminds me of an open question that was brought up at the general discussion on the Astronet plan at JENAM this year: How do you train and reward good software programming skills? Not all astronomers make good programmers and good programmers are increasingly needed.

Markus Poessel comments that emerging astronomy communities (eg in developing countries) often start with being data miners.

Patricia Whitelock comments that a deep understanding of instruments and data will remain crucial to understand data and therefore the science that data contain. We won’t create virtual discoverers

There is another comment on how simulations are also a growing data generation process. No time to expand on that comment but it’s a good point!