and some more Zooniverse

5-23:  Galaxy Zoo Mergers (1 hour)
5-25:  Galaxy Zoo Mergers (1 hour)
5-26:  Ice Hunters (1 hour)
6-1:    Ice Hunters (1 hour)

APOD 4.7

Space Shuttle Rising

This picture is of the Endeavour Spacecraft taking off on May 16th, 2011 from the Kennedy Space Center.  As it disappeared from view below the clouds, the shuttle became visible to passing aircrafts.  The huge shuttle looks like a spec on the flat cloud layer, with a long shadow of its trail behind it.  The picture was taken from a shuttle training aircraft, but pictures from other planes are available.  The shuttle docked with the International Space Station on the 18th, and will return in early June.  This was the final flight planned for the craft, as well as for any other spacecrafts in the coming years.

zooniverse

5-16:  Ice Hunters (1 hour)

Jocelyn Bell Biography

Valerie Korszen

Percival

Astronomy Period 1

18 May 2011

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

            Jocelyn Bell was born in 1943 in Belfast, Ireland.  Her full name is Susan Joselyn Bell Burnell, but often it is simply written as Jocelyn Bell.  Man people do not expect scientists to be religious, but her Quaker community was very supportive of her interests, as they highly value women’s education.  Her father read many books, and she became very interested in his books on astronomy at an early age. 

Her early years did not look bright, when she failed the test needed to pursue higher education in Britain.  At age eleven, her parents decided to send her to a boarding school in England, where she recalls having a very inspiring physics teacher.  Both of her parents encouraged her to try hard in school and become involved in the Quaker community.  If she had not gotten this support and inspiration, she may have never gone to college or spent hours a day analyzing miles of telescope data. 

Jocelyn is most well known for her work with Anthony Hewish, with whom she discovered pulsars.  After studying physics at Glasgow University, she went on to Cambridge University for graduate studies.  She assisted Anthony Hewish in building a large radio telescope, which they used to study quasars.  In 1967, she found strange radio signals that were too fast to come from quasars.  These bursts came in regular intervals, and after ruling out all other possibilities, her and Hewish decided that they could only have come from very dense, rapidly spinning collapsed stars.  Hewish received a Nobel Prize for the discovery, but she was not awarded for this work.  Jocelyn claims that she does not wish to win a Nobel Prize for her research, because if they were awarded to too many research students, it would decrease the significance of the awards given to people who truly deserve them.  She has received awards from other organizations in England and America, and eventually became a professor at a school for nontraditional students like herself, who may not have succeeded from the beginning.

Jocelyn Bell is a modest and determined researcher and professor who has become an inspiration to her students.  She has studied the universe in almost every category of the electromagnetic spectrum.  She is usually credited with the discovery of the first four pulsars, with the use of radio radiation.  She is married with one child and has traveled with her family to various observatories and locations, staying involved with the scientific world. 

Works Cited

CWP. "Jocelyn Bell Burnell." Physics & Astronomy. UCLA, 18 Apr. 1997. Web. 18 May 2011. <http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~cwp/Phase2/Burnell,_Jocelyn_Bell@841234567.html>.

Ey, Julie. "Jocelyn Bell Burnell." Cal Poly Pomona. NASA, 1998. Web. 18 May 2011. <http://www.csupomona.edu/~nova/scientists/articles/burn.html>.

PBS. "People and Discoveries: Jocelyn Bell." PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, 1991. Web. 18 May 2011. <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/babell.html>.

Zooniverse

5-10: Galaxy Zoo: Hubble (1 hour)

Zooooniverse

5-03:  Galaxy Zoo: Classify Galaxies (1 hour)
5-05:  Galaxy Zoo: Classify Galaxies (1 hour)

APOD 4.6

The Antennae

The image above shows two galaxies colliding with each other.  This event is about 60 million light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Corvus.  Since the stars are so far apart, they do not collide with stars from the other galaxy, but the dust and gas clouds create new areas of star formation.  The whole collision takes hundreds of millions of years, since they are so large and they are not moving very fast (relative to each other).  The galaxies will likely tear each other apart due to the gravitational changes.  Scientist think that the two galaxies have collided already and are going to continue to collide until they merge together into one.