Wadhurst Astronomical Society Newsletter January 2020

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Wadhurst Astronomical Society Newsletter January 2020 Wadhurst Astronomical Society Newsletter January 2020 MEETINGS COMMITTEE MEETING Members of the Committee are respectfully reminded that there is a meeting of the Committee at Jim’s house on Tuesday 7th of January starting at 1930. DECEMBER MEETING Following an outline of the evenings programme, Phil Berry introduced our speaker, our own Chairman, Brian Mills who continues his look at the important contribution women have made to astronomy. More About Female Astronomers Brian Mills FRAS In 2016 Brian told us about the important contribution made by a number of women astronomers and tonight he said he is going to talk about two more, Vera Rubin and Beatrice Tinsley. But first we were reminded of En Heduanna, who lived more than 4,000 years ago. She used astronomy to predict important occasions such as when to plant crops and even when to get married. Then about 400 AD, Hypatia worked on conical sections, important when looking at planetary orbits and also the shapes of mirrors. Another important female astronomer was William Herschel’s sister, Caroline, who in her own right discovered a number of comets. Previously Brian had told us about the ladies who measured photographic plates and catalogued stellar brightnesses for Edward Pickering at Harvard University around the start of the 20th century, notably Henrietta Leavitt, who discovered the relationship between the brightness and period of Cepheid variables providing the yardstick to measure the size of our own galaxy and the distance to others, although at that time women were not even permitted in observatories. Now Brian introduced us to Vera Rubin. Vera was born Vera Florence Cooper in Philadelphia in 1928. She became interested in astronomy and at 14 built her own telescope using a cardboard tube that had originally been used to wrap lino around. 1 Vera Ruben with the telescope she had built at the age of 14. At high school she was told that astronomy was not very lady-like but she did win a scholarship to Vassar College in New York and after three years graduated with a degree in astronomy in 1948. She applied to Princeton University to study astrophysics but was told that women were not allowed to study physics or be taken onto astronomy programmes, but eventually Vera earned a Masters Degree at Cornell University in 1951, having married Bob Rubin also a student there. Her interest was in the velocity of galaxies but we were told that at the time, astronomy was very male-oriented and she found difficulty in finding employment. In 1952, despite now having a family, Vera was encouraged by her husband to take her PhD so she attended Georgetown University with George Gamow as her doctoral advisor who she described as a bit odd. For her thesis she continued to study galaxies and their distribution and concluded that they tended to clump together although this was rather controversial at the time. She earned her PhD in 1954. Vera spent a year teaching Maths and Physics followed by 10 years as a lecturer, research astronomer and assistant professor in astronomy at Georgetown. At one time, she was handed a photographic plate taken by Kent Ford at Mount Wilson Observatory and asked if she could measure the velocities of stars in the galaxy. She said she could and having achieved it was offered a job at Carnegie in the Terrestrial Magnetism department. So much was her recognition in astronomy that she even became officially the first female astronomer to use the Mount Palomar 200-inch telescope. By measuring the variations in red-shifts of local galaxies including the Milky Way Vera Rubin calculated that they were all moving towards what became known as “The Great Attractor” but she was advised to give the idea up because it couldn’t be true, yet as Brian said, in the 1980s she was proved to be correct. Because of the controversy, she concentrated on measuring the rotation of spiral galaxies, working with Kent Ford who had designed a new advanced spectrometer. They took a number of plates at various observatories. Vera Rubin and Kent Ford working together at Lowell Observatory in 1965 Smithsonian Institute 2 Brian said that very quickly it became obvious something was not as expected. In measuring the speed of stars in galaxies, Vera found that the outer stars were orbiting with such velocity that they would be expected to fly apart and away from the galaxy. She suggested that there was something we could not see that was holding the stars together and that probably we were only seeing about 10% of all matter. There must be something present within the galaxies and that has become known as Dark Matter. More recently, measurements suggest that we see about 5% visible matter with about 27% Dark Matter and 68% Dark Energy. Vera Rubin received many awards such as the national Medal of Science, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and Honorary Doctorates from Yale, Harvard, Grinnell and Princeton. Smithsonian institute Vera Rubin died on Christmas Day 2016 aged 88. The second woman astronomer Brian told us about was Beatrice Tinsley. She was born Beatrice Muriel Hill in Chester, England in 1941 but she and her parents emigrated to New Zealand after the war. Beatrice Muriel Hill Emigrated to New Zealand with her parents after World War 2 She wanted to take music and maths at school, but was sent to the boy’s school to study the latter. In 1958 she was awarded a scholarship to Canterbury University and chose to study physics. Beatrice graduated in physics in 1962 and then took a Master’s Degree in crystal structures in magnesium nitrate. At this time she married a fellow student, Brian Tinsley and in 1963 they moved to Dallas in the USA. She enrolled on a PhD course at Austin and received her PhD in 1968. 3 We were told that in her thesis Beatrice stated that the colour of a galaxy depends on how the stars formed and changed as they evolved, so the galaxy changed in brightness and to ignore this would introduce errors into calculations. She also stated that the Universe would expand forever. Her reputation grew and she was appointed visiting professor at Californian Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland, Yale and Lick observatories but it wasn’t until 1975, following her divorce the previous year that she obtained permanent employment as a Cosmologist – a Theoretical Astrophysicist at Yale which Brian said was exactly the sort of job she wanted. Her contribution to the formation of galaxies was being recognised more and more. She was the first person to create a computer model of how colour and brightness changed as a galaxy aged and she made accurate predictions of how the interstellar medium was re-cycled. Beatrice Tinsley at a symposium in 1977 New York Times 1978, Beatrice became the first woman to become a full professor of astronomy at Yale. Sadly, she was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer following the discovery of a mole on her leg and she died in March 1981 aged just 40 but we were told that she had even written references for each of her students that they could use after her death. Beatrice Tinsley received many awards and recognitions. A main belt asteroid 3087 was named after her as was a mountain in New Zealand and in Auckland a street was named in her honour but Brian said one of her greatest accolades was to receive recognition by Google to mark what would have been her 75th birthday! Following Brian’s talk we had a coffee and tea break with seasonal biscuits, Stollen and mince pies provided by Eva, Jan and Gill with grateful thanks. Our December meeting wouldn’t be the same without John Wayte’s Christmas Quiz, and he didn’t let us down. THE CHRISTMAS QUIZ A popular event at our December meetings is John Wayte’s Christmas Quiz, and John didn’t let us down and provided a number of challenging and not so challenging questions with prizes to be won. Here are just a few samples of his quiz questions. 1. Which astronomer is best known for his laws of planetary motions? 2. Ariel, Umbriel, Miranda, Titania and Oberon are all moons of which planet? 3. Olympus Mons is a large volcanic mountain on which planet? 4. Name the Russian space station that operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001? 5. Can you name either of the two moons of Mars? 6. How many moons in total do the four terrestrial planets have? 7. Name the first man made object to leave the Solar System and cross into Interstellar Space? 4 8. What unit of length is equal to about 3.26 light-years? 9. Which space probe was the first to orbit another planet? 10. How much of the Milky Way is visible? a. Less than 5% b. Around 50% c. More than 90% 11. Name the comet that completes an orbit of the Sun approximately once every three years – the shortest period of any known comet? 12. Which planet did Sir William Herschel discover in 1781? The answers can be found at the end of the newsletter. JANUARY MEETING 15 January 2020 – There will be a brief Annual General Meeting followed by a talk by Ian King entitled “Remote Astronomy”. Ian runs a remote astronomical telescope in Spain where the skies are far better than we get here in the UK. He intends demonstrating the facility live during the January meeting. Meetings will take place at Uplands College, Lower High Street, Wadhurst and are held in classrooms IL5 and IL6, which are in the blue walled classroom block at the far end of the drive from the main gate and up by the tennis courts now being used as a temporary building site.
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