DOCSLIB.ORG

July 2019 Report

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
July 2019 Report July- 2019 India Science Wire - highlighting Indian science in Indian media The coverage of science and technology particularly relating to research done in Indian research institutions, is generally very poor in Indian media. There are several reasons for this situation, one of them being the lack of credible and relevant science content. In order to bridge this gap, Vigyan Prasar launched a unique initiative - India Science Wire (ISW) – in January 2017. The news service is dedicated to developments in Indian research laboratories, universities and academic institutions. Almost all news stories released by this service are based on research papers by Indian scientists published in leading Indian and foreign journals. All news stories and features are written and edited by a team of professional science journalists with decades of experience in science journalism. News stories based on happenings in Indian research labs are released to media houses on a daily basis. These stories are also uploaded on ISW website and are simultaneously promoted though social media – Twitter and Facebook. At present, the service is available in English and Hindi. Reach out ISW Editor with story ideas, comments and suggestions at [email protected] ISW website: http://vigyanprasar.gov.in/isw/isw.htm 1 2 ISW stories released and published in July 2019 S.No Story title Date of release Name of the writer 1 Here is how millets can make India’s July 1 Dinesh C Sharma food basket climate-resilient 2 Vitamin combo may help treat kala July 1 Sunderarajan azar Padmanabhan 3 AI helps identify bat species July 2 Dinesh C Sharma suspected of carrying Nipah virus 4 Neem chemical can disable cotton July 2 Susheela Srinivas pest in multiple ways: study 5 Human Atlas - an Initiative for holistic July 3 Aditi Jain understanding of human biology 6 Urbanization, changing cropping July 3 Umashankar Mishra patterns contributing to temperature rise: study 7 Micro plastics - an invisible danger to July 4 Aditi Jain human health 8 Here is how forecast of extreme July 5 Raghu Murtugudde rainfall events can be improved 9 These innovations are high tech yet July 6 Dinesh C Sharma frugal in application 10 Indian scientists develop 'black gold' July 8 Dinesh C Sharma - a wonder material 11 ICMR launches Mission SHAKTTI July 8 Jyoti Singh 12 Dual drug delivery system may make July 9 Susheela Srinivas heart stents safer 13 Adequate water most important for July 9 Monika Kundu Srivastava plant diversity 14 Enthusiastic female participation in July 9 Jyoti Singh Smart India Hackthon-2019 3 15 Platform to accelerate innovations July 10 Jyoti Singh for India 16 Study highlights need to understand July 10 Sunderarajan people’s perspective too for better Padmanabhan conservation efforts 17 How advances in nanotechnology July 15 Susheela Srinivas may help in targeted cancer treatment 18 Scientists figure out molecular July 15 Sunderarajan mechanism behind latent TB Padmanabhan 19 Increasing protein and dairy intake July 16 Aditi Jain may help reduce burden of diabetes: study 20 Call to strengthen infrastructure for July 17 Sunderarajan quality assurance Padmanabhan 21 Here is a chance to name an July 17 T V Venkateswaran exoplanet and its star 22 Here is why states need tailor-made July 17 Aditi Jain strategies to address anaemia 23 No evidence of rift between Einstein July 18 Dinesh C Sharma and Bose: new book 24 Promising tech startups get grants July 18 Jyoti Singh worth Rupees 6 crore 25 Indian scientists develop database of July 19 Dinesh C Sharma everyday chemicals harmful to human health 26 New method to study insect muscles July 19 Sunderarajan developed Padmanabhan 27 Scientists find a new nano-drug July 22 Susheela Srinivas delivery route for chemotherapy 28 A diabetes drug can prevent July 22 Jyoti Singh cardiovascular and kidney diseases 4 also: study 29 Study warns Kala azar patients can July 23 Sunderarajan infect others even after treatment Padmanabhan 30 Lack of awareness and timely July 24 Rayies Altaf intervention resulting in disabilities due of leprosy: study 31 Setting right a defective heart July 24 Susheela Srinivas condition 32 Extremely tiny gold nanorattle may July 25 Dinesh C Sharma help detect serotonin levels instantly 33 India set to launch a Deep Ocean July 28 Sunderarajan Mission for sustainable use of ocean Padmanabhan resources 34 Missing gamma ray puzzle solved July 29 T V Venkateswaran 35 Travelling show on mega science July 29 Sunderarajan reaches Bengaluru Padmanabhan 36 Artificial Intelligence can help decode July 30 Susheela Srinivas epileptic brains 37 New molecule promises to address July 30 Sunderarajan drug resistance Padmanabhan 38 New method developed to test July 31 Sunderarajan cancer drugs Padmanabhan 39 Using machine learning, scientists July 31 Dinesh C Sharma develop pre-screening tool for cancer 5 1 जलवायु अनुकूलन मे मह配वपूर्ण हो सकते हℂ मोटे July 2 दिनेश सी. शमाण अनाज 2 शहरीकरर् और फसल चक्र में बिलाव से बढ़ रहा है July 3 उमाशंकर ममश्र तापमान 3 वैज्ञामनकⴂ ने की FMD पशु संक्रमर् के आनुवांमशक July 4 शुभ्रता ममश्रा कारर्ⴂ की खोज 4 युवा अꅍवेषकⴂ के हाइटेक नवाचारⴂ को पुरकार July 8 उमाशंकर ममश्र 5 टीबी से बचाव के मलए आईसीएमआर कर रहा है July 16 उमाशंकर ममश्र टीकⴂ का परीक्षर् 6 नई तकनीक से चुनौमतयⴂ के हल खोजने वाले July 18 उमाशंकर ममश्र उद्यममयⴂ को पुरकार 7 रसायन मुक्त चाय उ配पािन में मििगार हो सकते हℂ July 19 उमाशंकर ममश्र सूक्ष्मजीव 8 कालाजार से उबरने के बाि भी मरीजⴂ से फैल July 22 उमाशंकर ममश्र सकता है संक्रमर् 9 भारतीय शोधकताण䴂 ने मवकमसत दकया जहरीले July 23 दिनेश सी. शमाण रसायनⴂ का डेटाबेस 10 नैनो तकनीक से बढ़ायी जा सकेगी टायरⴂ की July 24 उमाशंकर ममश्र मजबूती उमाशंकर ममश्र 11 मवज्ञान समागम में दिखेगी बडी मवज्ञान July 29 उमाशंकर ममश्र पररयोजना䴂 की झलक 12 प्रमतरोधी सूक्ष्मजीवⴂ से लडने के मलए ममला July 30 उमाशंकर ममश्र नया हमियार 13 कागज और पेंमसल से बनाया पोटेबल हीटर July 31 शुभ्रता ममश्रा 6 7 8 https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/science/travelling-show-on-mega-science- reaches-bengaluru/article28747096.ece 9 10 11 12 13 https://newsroom24x7.com/2019/07/06/these-innovations-are-high-tech-yet-frugal-in-application/ 14 15 16 17 18 https://www.prabhasakshi.com/proventhings/award-to-high-tech-innovations-of-young-inventors 19 20 21 http://netindian.in/news/2019/07/29/00058365/india-set-launch-deep-ocean-mission- sustainable-use-ocean-resources 22 23 24 http://www.easternmirrornagaland.com/promising-tech-startups-get-grants-worth-rupees-six-crore/ 25 26 27 https://www.prabhasakshi.com/proventhings/award-to-entrepreneurs-seeking-solutions-to-challenges 28 29 30 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/hindistory/tyre-strength-can-be-enhanced-by-nano- technology-65812 31 32 33 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/governance/call-to-strengthen-infrastructure-for- quality-assurance-65699 34 35 36 37 https://thefederal.com/health/2019/07/03/human-atlas-an-initiative-for-holistic- understanding-of-human-biology/ 38 39 40 Top tweets featuring ISW stories 41 42 43 44 45 46 Here is how millets can make India’s food basket climate-resilient 01-Jul-2019 New Delhi, July 1 (India Science Wire): Increasing temperatures, changing monsoon and more frequent extreme climate events are posing a threat to food security in India. A new study has found that while almost all grain crops are sensitive to these changes, adding more coarse grains or millets in crop production mix may help make food supply withstand vagaries of climate change. In the past 45 years, the overall monsoon rainfall has decreased, there is greater variability in daily rainfall, temperatures have risen, extreme events have gone up and so has frequency of droughts. The study quantified the impact of all these changes on crop yields all over the country during this period (1966 – 2011). 47 The analysis revealed that compared to rice, alternative grains (finger millet, maize, pearl millet and sorghum) are significantly less sensitive to climate variability and generally experienced smaller decline in yields under climate extremes. All these are mostly rain- dependent crops and grown during the kharif season. Wheat, grown in the rabi season, was not included in the analysis. In general, the yields of alternative grains are lower than rice, but in certain districts, coarse grains performed better than rice under rainfed conditions. For example, pearl millet and sorghum in central India and maize in many parts of the country. This means there is already an opportunity to increase climate resilience and grain production both by increasing crop area for these grains. Since rice yields, compared to all the coarse grains, are more sensitive to fluctuations in rainfall in both irrigated and rainfed areas, replacing it with coarse grains will help stabilize grain production across a range of climatic conditions, the study has said. This, along with other strategies like building buffer stock to absorb climate shock, developing drought-tolerant varieties and boosting irrigation could help meet the climate challenge. At present, rice accounts for 44 per cent of annual grain production and 73 per cent of grain production during the kharif season. The rest 27 percent of grain production during kharif comes from maize (15%), pearl millet (8%), sorghum (2.5%) and finger millet (1.5%).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Lurking in the Shadows: Wide-Separation Gas Giants As Tracers of Planet Formation
    Lurking in the Shadows: Wide-Separation Gas Giants as Tracers of Planet Formation Thesis by Marta Levesque Bryan In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Pasadena, California 2018 Defended May 1, 2018 ii © 2018 Marta Levesque Bryan ORCID: [0000-0002-6076-5967] All rights reserved iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank Heather Knutson, who I had the great privilege of working with as my thesis advisor. Her encouragement, guidance, and perspective helped me navigate many a challenging problem, and my conversations with her were a consistent source of positivity and learning throughout my time at Caltech. I leave graduate school a better scientist and person for having her as a role model. Heather fostered a wonderfully positive and supportive environment for her students, giving us the space to explore and grow - I could not have asked for a better advisor or research experience. I would also like to thank Konstantin Batygin for enthusiastic and illuminating discussions that always left me more excited to explore the result at hand. Thank you as well to Dimitri Mawet for providing both expertise and contagious optimism for some of my latest direct imaging endeavors. Thank you to the rest of my thesis committee, namely Geoff Blake, Evan Kirby, and Chuck Steidel for their support, helpful conversations, and insightful questions. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with Brendan Bowler. His talk at Caltech my second year of graduate school introduced me to an unexpected population of massive wide-separation planetary-mass companions, and lead to a long-running collaboration from which several of my thesis projects were born.
    [Show full text]
  • Naming the Extrasolar Planets
    Naming the extrasolar planets W. Lyra Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, K¨onigstuhl 17, 69177, Heidelberg, Germany [email protected] Abstract and OGLE-TR-182 b, which does not help educators convey the message that these planets are quite similar to Jupiter. Extrasolar planets are not named and are referred to only In stark contrast, the sentence“planet Apollo is a gas giant by their assigned scientific designation. The reason given like Jupiter” is heavily - yet invisibly - coated with Coper- by the IAU to not name the planets is that it is consid- nicanism. ered impractical as planets are expected to be common. I One reason given by the IAU for not considering naming advance some reasons as to why this logic is flawed, and sug- the extrasolar planets is that it is a task deemed impractical. gest names for the 403 extrasolar planet candidates known One source is quoted as having said “if planets are found to as of Oct 2009. The names follow a scheme of association occur very frequently in the Universe, a system of individual with the constellation that the host star pertains to, and names for planets might well rapidly be found equally im- therefore are mostly drawn from Roman-Greek mythology. practicable as it is for stars, as planet discoveries progress.” Other mythologies may also be used given that a suitable 1. This leads to a second argument. It is indeed impractical association is established. to name all stars. But some stars are named nonetheless. In fact, all other classes of astronomical bodies are named.
    [Show full text]
  • IAU Division C Working Group on Star Names 2019 Annual Report
    IAU Division C Working Group on Star Names 2019 Annual Report Eric Mamajek (chair, USA) WG Members: Juan Antonio Belmote Avilés (Spain), Sze-leung Cheung (Thailand), Beatriz García (Argentina), Steven Gullberg (USA), Duane Hamacher (Australia), Susanne M. Hoffmann (Germany), Alejandro López (Argentina), Javier Mejuto (Honduras), Thierry Montmerle (France), Jay Pasachoff (USA), Ian Ridpath (UK), Clive Ruggles (UK), B.S. Shylaja (India), Robert van Gent (Netherlands), Hitoshi Yamaoka (Japan) WG Associates: Danielle Adams (USA), Yunli Shi (China), Doris Vickers (Austria) WGSN Website: https://www.iau.org/science/scientific_bodies/working_groups/280/ ​ WGSN Email: [email protected] ​ The Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) consists of an international group of astronomers with expertise in stellar astronomy, astronomical history, and cultural astronomy who research and catalog proper names for stars for use by the international astronomical community, and also to aid the recognition and preservation of intangible astronomical heritage. The Terms of Reference and membership for WG Star Names (WGSN) are provided at the IAU website: https://www.iau.org/science/scientific_bodies/working_groups/280/. ​ ​ ​ WGSN was re-proposed to Division C and was approved in April 2019 as a functional WG whose scope extends beyond the normal 3-year cycle of IAU working groups. The WGSN was specifically called out on p. 22 of IAU Strategic Plan 2020-2030: “The IAU serves as the ​ internationally recognised authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and their surface features. To do so, the IAU has a number of Working Groups on various topics, most notably on the nomenclature of small bodies in the Solar System and planetary systems under Division F and on Star Names under Division C.” WGSN continues its long term activity of researching cultural astronomy literature for star names, and researching etymologies with the goal of adding this information to the WGSN’s online materials.
    [Show full text]
  • Mètodes De Detecció I Anàlisi D'exoplanetes
    MÈTODES DE DETECCIÓ I ANÀLISI D’EXOPLANETES Rubén Soussé Villa 2n de Batxillerat Tutora: Dolors Romero IES XXV Olimpíada 13/1/2011 Mètodes de detecció i anàlisi d’exoplanetes . Índex - Introducció ............................................................................................. 5 [ Marc Teòric ] 1. L’Univers ............................................................................................... 6 1.1 Les estrelles .................................................................................. 6 1.1.1 Vida de les estrelles .............................................................. 7 1.1.2 Classes espectrals .................................................................9 1.1.3 Magnitud ........................................................................... 9 1.2 Sistemes planetaris: El Sistema Solar .............................................. 10 1.2.1 Formació ......................................................................... 11 1.2.2 Planetes .......................................................................... 13 2. Planetes extrasolars ............................................................................ 19 2.1 Denominació .............................................................................. 19 2.2 Història dels exoplanetes .............................................................. 20 2.3 Mètodes per detectar-los i saber-ne les característiques ..................... 26 2.3.1 Oscil·lació Doppler ........................................................... 27 2.3.2 Trànsits
    [Show full text]
  • Density Estimation for Projected Exoplanet Quantities
    Density Estimation for Projected Exoplanet Quantities Robert A. Brown Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218 [email protected] ABSTRACT Exoplanet searches using radial velocity (RV) and microlensing (ML) produce samples of “projected” mass and orbital radius, respectively. We present a new method for estimating the probability density distribution (density) of the un- projected quantity from such samples. For a sample of n data values, the method involves solving n simultaneous linear equations to determine the weights of delta functions for the raw, unsmoothed density of the unprojected quantity that cause the associated cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the projected quantity to exactly reproduce the empirical CDF of the sample at the locations of the n data values. We smooth the raw density using nonparametric kernel density estimation with a normal kernel of bandwidth σ. We calibrate the dependence of σ on n by Monte Carlo experiments performed on samples drawn from a the- oretical density, in which the integrated square error is minimized. We scale this calibration to the ranges of real RV samples using the Normal Reference Rule. The resolution and amplitude accuracy of the estimated density improve with n. For typical RV and ML samples, we expect the fractional noise at the PDF peak to be approximately 80 n− log 2. For illustrations, we apply the new method to 67 RV values given a similar treatment by Jorissen et al. in 2001, and to the 308 RV values listed at exoplanets.org on 20 October 2010. In addition to an- alyzing observational results, our methods can be used to develop measurement arXiv:1011.3991v3 [astro-ph.IM] 21 Mar 2011 requirements—particularly on the minimum sample size n—for future programs, such as the microlensing survey of Earth-like exoplanets recommended by the Astro 2010 committee.
    [Show full text]
  • The N2K Consortium VI: Doppler Shifts Without Templates and Three
    The N2K Consortium VI: Doppler Shifts Without Templates and Three New Short–Period Planets 1 John Asher Johnson2, Geoffrey W. Marcy2, Debra A. Fischer3, Gregory Laughlin4, R. Paul Butler5, Gregory W. Henry6, Jeff A. Valenti7, Eric B. Ford2, Steven S. Vogt4, Jason T. Wright2 [email protected] ABSTRACT We present a modification to the iodine cell Doppler technique that eliminates the need for an observed stellar template spectrum. For a given target star, we iterate toward a synthetic template spectrum beginning with an existing spec- trum of a similar star. We then perturb the shape of this first–guess template to match the program observation of the target star taken through an iodine cell. The elimination of a separate template observation saves valuable telescope time, a feature that is ideally suited for the quick–look strategy employed by the “Next 2000 Stars” (N2K) planet search program. Tests using Keck/HIRES spec- tra indicate that synthetic templates yield a short–term precision of3ms−1 and a long–term, run–to–run precision of 5 m s−1. We used this new Doppler tech- nique to discover three new planets: a 1.50 MJup planet in a 2.1375 d orbit around HD 86081; a 0.71 MJup planet in circular, 26.73 d orbit around HD 224693; and a Saturn–mass planet in an 18.179 d orbit around HD 33283. The remarkably short period of HD 86081b bridges the gap between the extremely short–period planets detected in the OGLE survey and the 16 Doppler–detected hot jupiters arXiv:astro-ph/0604348v2 22 May 2006 1Based on observations obtained at the W.
    [Show full text]
  • Determining the True Mass of Radial-Velocity Exoplanets with Gaia 9 Planet Candidates in the Brown-Dwarf/Stellar Regime and 27 Confirmed Planets
    Astronomy & Astrophysics manuscript no. exoplanet_mass_gaia c ESO 2020 September 30, 2020 Determining the true mass of radial-velocity exoplanets with Gaia 9 planet candidates in the brown-dwarf/stellar regime and 27 confirmed planets F. Kiefer1; 2, G. Hébrard1; 3, A. Lecavelier des Etangs1, E. Martioli1; 4, S. Dalal1, and A. Vidal-Madjar1 1 Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, UMR 7095, 98 bis bd Arago, 75014 Paris, France 2 LESIA, Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Université de Paris, 5 place Jules Janssen, 92195 Meudon, France? 3 Observatoire de Haute-Provence, CNRS, Universiteé d’Aix-Marseille, 04870 Saint-Michel-l’Observatoire, France 4 Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica, Rua Estados Unidos 154, 37504-364, Itajubá - MG, Brazil Submitted on 2020/08/20 ; Accepted for publication on 2020/09/24 ABSTRACT Mass is one of the most important parameters for determining the true nature of an astronomical object. Yet, many published exoplan- ets lack a measurement of their true mass, in particular those detected thanks to radial velocity (RV) variations of their host star. For those, only the minimum mass, or m sin i, is known, owing to the insensitivity of RVs to the inclination of the detected orbit compared to the plane-of-the-sky. The mass that is given in database is generally that of an assumed edge-on system (∼90◦), but many other inclinations are possible, even extreme values closer to 0◦ (face-on). In such case, the mass of the published object could be strongly underestimated by up to two orders of magnitude.
    [Show full text]
  • Evidence for Enhanced Chromospheric Ca II H and K Emission in Stars with Close-In Extrasolar Planets
    A&A 540, A82 (2012) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201118247 & c ESO 2012 Astrophysics Evidence for enhanced chromospheric Ca II H and K emission in stars with close-in extrasolar planets T. Krejcovᡠ1 and J. Budaj2 1 Department of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, Masaryk University, Kotlárskᡠ2, 61137 Brno, Czech Republic e-mail: [email protected] 2 Astronomical Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, 05960 Tatranská Lomnica, Slovak Republic e-mail: [email protected] Received 11 October 2011 / Accepted 13 February 2012 ABSTRACT Context. The planet-star interaction is manifested in many ways. It has been found that a close-in exoplanet causes small but mea- surable variability in the cores of a few lines in the spectra of several stars, which corresponds to the orbital period of the exoplanet. Stars with and without exoplanets may have different properties. Aims. The main goal of our study is to search for the influence that exoplanets might have on atmospheres of their host stars. Unlike the previous studies, we do not study changes in the spectrum of a host star or differences between stars with and without exoplanets. We aim to study a large number of stars with exoplanets and the current level of their chromospheric activity and to look for a possible correlation with the exoplanetary properties. Methods. To analyse the chromospheric activity of stars, we exploited our own and publicly available archival spectra, measured the equivalent widths of the cores of Ca II H and K lines, and used them to trace their activity. Subsequently, we searched for their dependence on the orbital parameters and the mass of the exoplanet.
    [Show full text]
  • Radial Velocities from the N2K Project: 6 New Cold Gas Giant Planets Orbiting HD 55696, HD 98736, HD 148164, HD 203473, and HD 211810 Kristo Ment,1, 2 Debra A
    Draft version September 6, 2018 Typeset using LATEX preprint style in AASTeX62 Radial velocities from the N2K Project: 6 new cold gas giant planets orbiting HD 55696, HD 98736, HD 148164, HD 203473, and HD 211810 Kristo Ment,1, 2 Debra A. Fischer,1 Gaspar Bakos,3 Andrew W. Howard,4 and Howard Isaacson5 1Department of Astronomy, Yale University, 52 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511, USA 2Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA 3Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, NJ 08544, USA 4Department of Astronomy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA 5Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA (Received February 15, 2018; Revised August 23, 2018; Accepted August 29, 2018) Submitted to AJ ABSTRACT The N2K planet search program was designed to exploit the planet-metallicity cor- relation by searching for gas giant planets orbiting metal-rich stars. Here, we present the radial velocity measurements for 378 N2K target stars that were observed with the HIRES spectrograph at Keck Observatory between 2004 and 2017. With this data set, we announce the discovery of six new gas giant exoplanets: a double-planet system or- biting HD 148164 (M sin i of 1.23 and 5.16 MJUP) and single planet detections around HD 55696 (M sin i = 3.87 MJUP), HD 98736 (M sin i= 2.33 MJUP), HD 203473 (M sin i = 7.8 MJUP), and HD 211810 (M sin i = 0.67 MJUP). These gas giant companions have orbital semi-major axes between 1.0 and 6.2 AU and eccentricities ranging from 0.13 to 0.71.
    [Show full text]
  • IAU WGSN 2019 Annual Report
    IAU Division C Working Group on Star Names 2019 Annual Report Eric Mamajek (chair, USA) WG Members: Juan Antonio Belmote Avilés (Spain), Sze-leung Cheung (Thailand), Beatriz García (Argentina), Steven Gullberg (USA), Duane Hamacher (Australia), Susanne M. Hoffmann (Germany), Alejandro López (Argentina), Javier Mejuto (Honduras), Thierry Montmerle (France), Jay Pasachoff (USA), Ian Ridpath (UK), Clive Ruggles (UK), B.S. Shylaja (India), Robert van Gent (Netherlands), Hitoshi Yamaoka (Japan) WG Associates: Danielle Adams (USA), Yunli Shi (China), Doris Vickers (Austria) WGSN Website: https://www.iau.org/science/scientific_bodies/working_groups/280/ WGSN Email: [email protected] The Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) consists of an international group of astronomers with expertise in stellar astronomy, astronomical history, and cultural astronomy who research and catalog proper names for stars for use by the international astronomical community, and also to aid the recognition and preservation of intangible astronomical heritage. The Terms of Reference and membership for WG Star Names (WGSN) are provided at the IAU website: https://www.iau.org/science/scientific_bodies/working_groups/280/. WGSN was re-proposed to Division C and was approved in April 2019 as a functional WG whose scope extends beyond the normal 3-year cycle of IAU working groups. The WGSN was specifically called out on p. 22 of IAU Strategic Plan 2020-2030: “The IAU serves as the internationally recognised authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and their surface features. To do so, the IAU has a number of Working Groups on various topics, most notably on the nomenclature of small bodies in the Solar System and planetary systems under Division F and on Star Names under Division C.” WGSN continues its long term activity of researching cultural astronomy literature for star names, and researching etymologies with the goal of adding this information to the WGSN’s online materials.
    [Show full text]
  • Arxiv:1207.6212V2 [Astro-Ph.GA] 1 Aug 2012
    Draft: Submitted to ApJ Supp. A Preprint typeset using LTEX style emulateapj v. 5/2/11 PRECISE RADIAL VELOCITIES OF 2046 NEARBY FGKM STARS AND 131 STANDARDS1 Carly Chubak2, Geoffrey W. Marcy2, Debra A. Fischer5, Andrew W. Howard2,3, Howard Isaacson2, John Asher Johnson4, Jason T. Wright6,7 (Received; Accepted) Draft: Submitted to ApJ Supp. ABSTRACT We present radial velocities with an accuracy of 0.1 km s−1 for 2046 stars of spectral type F,G,K, and M, based on ∼29000 spectra taken with the Keck I telescope. We also present 131 FGKM standard stars, all of which exhibit constant radial velocity for at least 10 years, with an RMS less than 0.03 km s−1. All velocities are measured relative to the solar system barycenter. Spectra of the Sun and of asteroids pin the zero-point of our velocities, yielding a velocity accuracy of 0.01 km s−1for G2V stars. This velocity zero-point agrees within 0.01 km s−1 with the zero-points carefully determined by Nidever et al. (2002) and Latham et al. (2002). For reference we compute the differences in velocity zero-points between our velocities and standard stars of the IAU, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and l’Observatoire de Geneve, finding agreement with all of them at the level of 0.1 km s−1. But our radial velocities (and those of all other groups) contain no corrections for convective blueshift or gravitational redshifts (except for G2V stars), leaving them vulnerable to systematic errors of ∼0.2 km s−1 for K dwarfs and ∼0.3 km s−1 for M dwarfs due to subphotospheric convection, for which we offer velocity corrections.
    [Show full text]
  • Copyright by Kevin Carl Gullikson 2016 the Dissertation Committee for Kevin Carl Gullikson Certifies That This Is the Approved Version of the Following Dissertation
    Copyright by Kevin Carl Gullikson 2016 The Dissertation Committee for Kevin Carl Gullikson certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Spectroscopic Detection and Characterization of Extreme Flux-Ratio Binary Systems Committee: Adam Kraus, Supervisor Sarah Dodson-Robinson Daniel T. Jaffe Edward L. Robinson Michael Meyer Spectroscopic Detection and Characterization of Extreme Flux-Ratio Binary Systems by Kevin Carl Gullikson, B.S; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2016 Dedicated to my loving parents, who encouraged my exploration of science from an early age. Acknowledgements I would like to start by thanking everyone who served as a supervisor during part of my thesis. Mike Endl served as my co-supervisor for two years, taught me how to observe on the 2.7m telescope at McDonald observatory, and involved me in the planet search program for the last 5 years. That experience provided many interesting nights, a fun "side project", and gave me the confidence to do much of the observing for my main survey program. Sally Dodson-Robinson served as my thesis supervisor for my first two years. She gave me a great deal of independence in my project, while providing valuable feedback. I would like to thank both her and my current supervisor, Adam Kraus, for nominating me for several UT fellowships and funding me as a research assistant during much of my graduate career.
    [Show full text]