American Astronomical Society Research Articles

Measuring the Chemodynamics and Ages of the M32 and M110 Dwarf Galaxies with APOGEE

We present a full-spectrum-fitting analysis of the central kinematics and chemistry of the Andromeda dwarf satellite galaxies M32 and M110. We use an Markov Chain Monte Carlo routine to fit high-resolution, near-infrared, integrated-light spectra from APOGEE with empirical simple stellar population templates constructed from individual APOGEE stellar spectra. This yields the best-fitting mean radial velocity, velocity dispersion, metallicity, α abundance, and age for each spectrum. In general, our results are consistent with literature values where available, and we explore possible reasons where offsets are measured. This study was presented in a poster at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in 2024 January.

Lopsided Galaxy Distributions in Massive TNG300 Clusters

Studies of isolated central galaxies and their satellites have shown that the spatial distributions of the satellites are distinctly “lopsided” with respect to the locations of the central galaxies. Here we extend this type of analysis to larger systems by analyzing the lopsidedness of 280 massive galaxy clusters in the IllustrisTNG300 Λ Cold Dark Matter simulation. Using a pairwise clustering statistic, we compute the probability that pairs of cluster galaxies are separated by a given polar angle difference, Δϕ, in the plane of the sky. Relative to the location of the central cluster galaxy, we find a statistically significant excess of galaxy pairs that are located on the same side of the cluster. The lopsidedness of the galaxy distribution is most pronounced for large clusters and for pairs of intrinsically red galaxies. The results summarized here were presented at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

A hybrid soft material robotic end-effector for reversible in-space assembly of strut components.

Based on the NASA in-Space Assembled Telescope (iSAT) study (Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 2019, 51, 50) which details the design and requirements for a 20-m parabolic in-space telescope, NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) has been developing structural and robotic solutions to address the needs of building larger in-space assets. One of the structural methods studied involves stackable and collapsible modular solutions to address launch vehicle volume constraints. This solution uses a packing method that stacks struts in a dixie-cup like manner and a chemical composite bonding technique that reduces weight of the structure, adds strength, and offers the ability to de-bond the components for structural modifications. We present in this paper work towards a soft material robot end-effector, capable of suppling the manipulability, pressure, and temperature requirements for the bonding/de-bonding of these conical structural components. This work is done to investigate the feasibility of a hybrid soft robotic end-effector actuated by Twisted and Coiled Artificial Muscles (TCAMs) for in-space assembly tasks. TCAMs are a class of actuator which have garnered significant recent research interest due to their allowance for high force to weight ratio when compared to other popular methods of actuation within the field of soft robotics, and a muscle-tendon actuation design using TCAMs leads to a compact and lightweight system with controllable and tunable behavior. In addition to the muscle-tendon design, this paper also details the early investigation of an induction system for adhesive bonding/de-bonding and the sensors used for benchtop design and testing. Additionally, we discuss the viability of Robotic Operating System 2 (ROS2) and Gazebo modeling environments for soft robotics as they pertain to larger simulation efforts at LaRC. We show real world test results against simulation results for a method which divides the soft, continuous material of the end-effector into discrete links connected by spring-like joints.

Assessing the Demographics of Participants in Press Conferences at Meetings of the American Astronomical Society (2010-2022)

The Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy (CSWA) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) undertook a study to assess the participation of community members in AAS press conferences at meetings between 2010 and 2022. 130 respondents answered both free-response and multiple-choice questions. In general, selection of AAS press conference presenters broadly represents AAS membership but subtleties in who is selected to participate shows inequities among women and gender minorities, people of color, institution type and career stage. By implementing several recommendations, including continuing dual-anonymous peer review of meeting abstracts for inclusion in press conferences, the AAS can diversify participation, better serve its broad membership, and work toward achieving goals set forth in its Strategic Plan.

LIGHTSOUND: ACCESSIBILITY AND AWARENESS FOR UPCOMING SOLAR ECLIPSES

People from all over the United States (and abroad) flocked to the path of totality to witness the Great American Solar Eclipse in 2017. The sentiment was the same for the 2019 and 2020 South American eclipses that passed through Chile and Argentina. While a total solar eclipse is typically thought of as a striking visual phenomenon, it is not the only way to observe one, and for blind or low vision individuals, having an alternate medium to observe an eclipse is a necessity. LightSound is a low-cost, hand-held device that was originally developed for the 2017 North American eclipse. It has a very high-dynamic range sensor that converts light to sound in a process called sonification. The sound can be output to headphones or to a speaker during an event to make the entire event more accessible while capturing the dimming of the Sun in the form of sound. All documentation and software needed to build and use the LightSound are open source and free for download and modification. As the 2023 and 2024 North American solar eclipses approach, we aim to increase the number of LightSounds across the paths of totality so that the experiences can be more inclusive and accessible. In the astronomy community, we are holding a series of workshops through the American Astronomical Society to train new users to build and use the devices, but we hope to expand to a more general audience by connecting with organizations such as libraries, museums, national parks, girl/boy scouts, and others groups who we can help to build the necessary devices for communities and events in need. In addition to eclipses, the LightSound has exciting potential for use as a teaching tool at both K-12 levels and undergraduate levels and for raising awareness about sonification as a powerful and important analysis method in science.

Asclepias: Software Citations Enter the Scholarly Literature World

In September of 2016, the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) started to work on the implementation of first-class support of software. This work was started as a result of the Asclepias project, funded through a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the American Astronomical Society. The main goal of the Asclepias project is to promote scientific software into an identifiable, citable, and preservable object. It highlighted the fact that no single stakeholder can solve the software citation problem. It requires close collaboration between a publisher (the American Astronomical Society), a repository (Zenodo) and an indexing service (ADS). This paper focuses on the contribution the ADS has made to this project. Five years later, the ADS has indexed just over 10k Zenodo software records, representing almost 19k citations. How did we get here? We describe the underlying infrastructure developed at ADS which implements a software citation detection, metadata capture and ingest, and event-driven notification system to a broker used by ADS collaborators. We include a discussion of the challenges that we have encountered in the implementation and operation of the system.

Open Science Data without Curation. Is It Useful? An American Astronomical Society Publishing Perspective

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) publishes approximately 5000 scholarly astronomical articles each year in our six Journals. For the last 20 years we have accepted and solicited data from authors to be integrated into the published article. Data includes machine readable tables, data behind figures, interactive figures, and external links to data repositories.

Implementation of The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus

The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) has been formally recognized and supported by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Starting in June of 2019, AAS journals such as the Astrophysical Journal and the Astronomical Journal have required UAT concepts for all new article submissions. The Hubble Space Telescope Call for Proposals Cycle 28 and the James Webb Space Telescope Call for Proposals Cycle 1 have both adopted the UAT as the source for descriptive keywords. We look back at usage of the UAT during its first two years of implementation and look forward to continuing to meet the needs of the astronomical community. The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus thrives on user input for growth, and the UAT Curator has seen an increase in feedback and submissions since being implemented into various systems. In order to better support continuous community feedback, the UAT Curator has defined a development roadmap to guide the yearly release cycle. UAT enhancements from the past two years will also be shared with the community. These include new concept branches, concept definitions derived from the Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and enhanced search capabilities.

Tapes and Papers: An Astronomical Heritage Archival Project of the American Astronomical Society and NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory

The American Astronomical Society (AAS) and NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) have combined staff expertise in data curation and archival practices to preserve, organize, and make accessible two archival collections to preserve important aspects of our astronomical heritage. An Archive Fellowship was created for a quarter-time graduate student to work on these two archives.

Accessibility of astronomy journal papers

The Working Group on Accessibility and Disability (WGAD) of the American Astronomical Society published a comprehensive list of accessibility recommendations for professional astronomy journals, based on the first-hand experience of both higher education students and professional astronomers. The recommendations include accessibility strategies intended to improve access for a wide range of disabled and neurodiverse readers, with particular attention to the way readers with visual, motor, and cognitive disabilities cope with information in a digital interface. In this paper we use the tools of critical discourse analysis (CDA) to compare the recommended strategies to the digital discursive modes currently employed by leading astronomy journals. Raters analyzed discourse modes for a sample of 256 astronomy journal articles, including the usage of linguistic indicators, digital architecture, and information display. We identify emergent categories of access barriers faced by disabled astronomers, and identify strategies in the journal papers addressing those emergent categories. We compare the discourse modes currently used in astronomy publications with the access barriers and recommended strategies described by the WGAD document. Our analysis found that discourses in astronomical publications were typically constituted with the expectation of various shared commonalities between the author and the reader, including: 1. Same sensorial modality of interaction; 2. Same experiential knowledge as authors; 3. Same access to information as authors; 4. Same linguistic knowledge as authors; 5. Same cognitive strategies as authors; 6. Same socioeconomic status and background. This case study may serve as a baseline for future studies on how inaccessible textual discourse, digital architecture, and digital display in STEM journals enhance professional inequalities. Examining how current standard journal standards impact the transition to different professional career stages would help to identify alternate discursive strategies which would improve accessibility.

SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN OBSERVATIONAL AND THEORETICAL SOLAR ASTRONOMY SINCE 1970

Studies of the Sun are widely considered to provide the 'Rosetta Stone' for understanding the broader cosmos. Yet, the field has seldom been entirely appreciated within astronomy. This is surprising given its leadership in the organization of U.S. astronomy and in the development of new observational techniques. We explore some developments since the founding of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society in 1970 as observational and theoretical techniques evolved, and note that the evolution towards ever 'Bigger Science' is unlikely to be sustainable. We suggest that future advances may need to rely more on thinking 'outside the box', and put forward some ideas that might prove fruitful in this respect.

New books & media

New books & media

Mean Resultant Length as a Measure of the Lopsidedness of Satellite Galaxy Distributions

Abstract We summarize new results for the locations of the satellites of isolated host galaxies that were presented at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Using 3575 host-satellite systems, we investigated the spatial distributions of the satellites with respect to their hosts using a Mean Resultant Length (MRL) statistic. In agreement with a previous analysis that relied on a less optimal statistic, we find that the satellites of isolated blue hosts have a strong tendency (>99.9999% confidence level) to be clustered toward one direction relative to their host. This also holds true for the full sample, but is driven by the “lopsidedness” of the satellite distributions around blue hosts. For red hosts (which comprise 76% of the sample), the MRL indicates only a marginal degree of lopsidedness (98.5% confidence level) in the satellite locations.

Mpact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Psychological Health of College Students in India

Uncertainty arose by the unprecedented spread of COVID-19 throughout the world, imposing a great challenge on students' psychological resilience. The current study aimed to do a nationwide survey on college students to understand the level of mental impact, stress, and anxiety among them amidst the coronavirus outbreak. We prepared a questionnaire packet having three sections viz. demographic information, Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), and possible stressors to collect the responses of students. Out of 414 responses, 32% of students unveiled mild anxiety symptoms, 16.7% moderate level anxiety, and 12% reported severe level anxiety. Demographic factors like age, marital status, degree and year had no significant impact on the anxiety level, whereas COVID-19 stressors such as the impact on academic activities worry about academic delays, and change in daily routine life had a remarkable positive impact on the anxiety level. Residing in an urban area and relative or acquaintance diagnosed with COVID-19 also noticeably triggered the mental sound health of the students. Our finding suggests that looking at the severity of the forthcoming situation, there is an urgent need to develop psychological interventions as a coping mechanism against anxiety to nurture the mental health of these vulnerable college students. © 1999. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

Eleanor Margaret Burbidge

Eleanor Margaret Burbidge

Knowledge Exchange: Roundtable Discussions

MODERATOR: Anna Jester eJournalPress Rockville, Maryland SPEAKERS: Angie Hunter American Chemical Society Washington, DC Gregory Schwarz American Astronomical Society Washington, DC REPORTER: Taryn Dollings American Society of Civil Engineers Reston, Virginia Publishers are increasingly striving to help authors make accurate and accessible data available not only to reviewers but also to readers. Many are considering workflow changes and new partnerships to help achieve this goal. To this end, this roundtable discussion brought together two experienced professionals to share their perspectives on validating and publishing data. Angie Hunter, Development Editor at the American Chemical Society, delivered a presentation on “Data Review and Initiatives at Organic Letters,” in which she reviewed the journal’s data analysis program. Organic Letters encourages, but does not require, its authors to submit raw data with their manuscripts. In response to often missing and incorrect data (and less often, manipulated data), Hunter and her team have developed a process for the editorial office to analyze data for accuracy and quality. Most of the work takes place once a revision is requested and then submitted. Data is reviewed for consistency with the submitted manuscript, and experimental procedures are checked for accuracy. The editorial office also reviews images for accuracy, legibility, and possible falsification. Hunter emphasized that although edited data or spectra comprise the smallest percentage of data analysis problems, they are often the most time-consuming to deal with. She also emphasized that the response from authors who have submitted edited data or spectra is mostly positive; authors are generally […]

Unified Astronomy Thesaurus: Usage Stats and Release Cycle

Abstract The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) is an open and community-supported thesaurus that was formally adopted by the American Astronomical Society on 2019 June 3. This article examines the usage of UAT concepts across AAS journals since its adoption and summarizes information about the variety of concepts used, the most commonly used concepts, and frequent concept co-occurrences. Finally, it provides an update on the documentation governing the release cycle for future versions of the UAT.

The Parallax of VHS J1256–1257 from CFHT and Pan-STARRS-1

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Astronomical Society via the DOI in this record

Editorial: Introducing the Planetary Science Journal

Abstract The Planetary Science Journal (PSJ) becomes the newest of the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) peer-reviewed journals. PSJ is devoted to recent developments, discoveries, and theories in planetary science, covering all aspects of investigation of our solar system and other planetary systems.

IVOA HiPS implementation in the framework of WorldWide Telescope

Abstract The WorldWide Telescope(WWT) is a scientific visualization platform which can browse deep space images, star catalogs, and planetary remote sensing data from different observation facilities in a three-dimensional virtual scene. First launched and then open-sourced by Microsoft Research, the WWT is now managed by the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Hierarchical Progressive Survey (HiPS) is an astronomical data release scheme proposed by Centre de Donnees astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) and has been accepted as a recommendation by International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). The HiPS solution has been adopted widely by many astronomical institutions for data release. Since WWT selected Hierarchical Triangular Mesh (HTM) as the standard for data visualization in the early stage of development, data released by HiPS cannot be visualized in WWT, which significantly limits the application of WWT. This paper introduces the implementation method for HiPS dataset visualization in WWT, and introduces HiPS data projection, mesh rendering, and data index implementation in WWT. Taking Chang’E-2 lunar probe data as an example, this paper introduces how to convert planetary remote sensing data into a HiPS dataset and integrate it into WWT. This paper also compares the efficiency and memory consumption of WWT loading its native data and HiPS data, and illustrates the application of HiPS in scientific data visualization and science education in WWT.