THE SKY’S NOT THE LIMIT FOR CANADIANS
Amateur astronomers win time on the MOST space telescope
Two Canadian amateur stargazers will trade in their backyard telescopes for one above their backyards... 820 kilometres above their backyards. They have been chosen to observe with Canada's space telescope.
MOST, a Canadian Space Agency satellite mission, stands for "Microvariability & Oscillations of STars", but last year, the MOST team announced an opportunity to make MOST mean "My Own Space Telescope". Amateur astronomers and students across Canada were invited to submit proposals for science to be done with the MOST space telescope. The MOST Science Team selected the first two winners, both members of the RASC: David Gamey, from Etobicoke, Ontario, who inspires his Scout packs to look to the stars, and Gordon Sarty, from Saskatoon, whose day job is to peer into the human brain.
| David Gamey chose as his MOST target one of the brightest stars in Canada's winter nightsky, and MOST began to monitor it on 15 December. Gamey, an amateur astronomer who teaches basic astronomy to Cubs, Scouts and youth groups, found that Betelgeuse is one of the most popular stars he talks about in his training sessions. "Cubs are fascinated by this bright star, asking questions like: When will it explode? Will our Sun turn into a supergiant like Betelgeuse? Does it have any planets?" says Gamey. "In a way, Canadian kids are my collaborators on this proposal, because Betelgeuse means something to them. It's a perfect candidate to bridge the curiosities of young people and scientists through the amazing capabilities of MOST." |  |
| Figure 1 Amateur astronomer David Garney at the eyepiece. |
"MOST will look for subtle vibrations in Betelgeuse that can tell astronomers its true mass and age," explains Dr. Jaymie Matthews, MOST Mission Scientist and an astrophysics professor at the University of British Columbia. The space telescope will also check for spots at the surface of the star. "It's the stellar equivalent of acne," jokes Matthews. "We're conducting a medical examination of a star in its last millennia before dying in a spectacular supernova explosion."
Gordon Sarty's proposal has a title that sounds like something that would be on the desk of an observatory Time Allocation Committee: "Spins and Orbital Debris in the Microquasar LS 5039."
Picture a hot star - 23 times more massive than our Sun – locked in an orbit with a black hole. The stellar wind spirals toward the black hole and their death cries emerge as gamma rays. LS 5039 is called a microquasar because it looks like a miniature version of quasars. Understanding LS 5039 – practically a neighbour to the Sun compared to quasars billions of light years distant – may help us better understand processes in the earliest generation of galaxies.
“My 5-year-old daughter Darien gave me a hug when I told her the news that I’d been selected,” says Sarty, a member of the Saskatoon Centre of the RASC and an expert on brain activity and MRI at the University of Saskatoon. “It's taking a while for it all to sink in.” Sarty has been an amateur astronomer since he was 9 years old and watched the Moon landings. “I’ve been observing variable stars for almost twenty years using a homemade telescope and my eyeball,” explains Sarty. “It feels like a step up – way up – to observe a microquasar with Canada’s space telescope.”
Sarty suggested that MOST could look for the subtle dimming of light as knots of gas pass in front of the LS 5039 star en route to oblivion. MOST data will enable scientists to use LS 5039 as a cosmic laboratory to study how gas is transferred from an ordinary star to a black hole, and how the star's magnetic field affects that escaping gas, teaching us lessons about our own Sun and its solar wind.
The MOST Science Team also gave an "Honourable Mention" to Jocelyn Larouche, of Jonquiere, Quebec, who proposed that MOST monitor a star located in front of a rich star-forming nebula, a cloud of gas and dust where stars are being born. His proposal to search for planets around this star would be a long shot – astronomical odds, so to speak – so it was not selected this time. According to Matthews, "This star will be an intriguing target for future space missions, and Jocelyn deserves recognition for his insight and imagination."
There were other worthy proposals, which are still in the running for the future. And the door remains open for other aspiring skygazers from across Canada to submit ideas for the MOST space telescope. Please encourage those in your community to visit the MOST website at www.astro.ubc.ca/MOST to find the MOST = My Own Space Telescope link and helpful on-line submission tools.
NASA GOES FOR THE MOST
American astronomers win time on the MOST space telescope
Last year, NASA approached the MOST Science Team and the CSA about having access to the MOST satellite and its unique capabilities. This resulted in a NASA Guest Observer programme, in which the Science Team agreed to make up to two months of observing time available to US scientists during the year from February 2009 through January 2010.
An Announcement of Opportunity was released this past summer. A review panel consisting of the MOST Science Team and three NASA-appointed reviewers, with the approval of the head of NASA’s Science Directorate, has selected the successful proposals at a meeting in Washington DC, in December. The investigators for those proposals will receive NASA funding to support the research projects.
The identities of those investigators cannot be announced publicly until NASA has informed them and the other applicants of the results of the selection process.
The MOST Science Team continues to accept unsolicited proposals from anyone in the astronomical community. While there is no obligation to accept any particular fraction of those proposals, many have been selected in the past four years and the principal investigators of the successful proposals automatically become lead authors of the eventual publications.
I remind all Canadian astronomers that their proposals are always welcome and those proposals will be evaluated during the MOST Target Selection meetings which occur at six-month intervals, in July and December.
MOST was intended to be a one-year mission, but the satellite has passed its fifth birthday in orbit, and there is every reason to believe it could be operating until 2011, and possibly even until 2014. That translates into many opportunities for science. Also, keep in mind that many MOST photometric data sets (raw and reduced) are waiting for you in the Public Data Archive on the MOST website (www.astro.ubc.ca/MOST) so there are many treasures yet to be mined.