Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

This chapter talks about Mike Mumma and his team, which chronologically is the first group to publicly stake a claim to having discovered methane in the atmosphere of Mars in 2003. It explores the May 2003 abstract that served as a placeholder for a presentation Mumma would give at an American Astronomical Society Division of Planetary Sciences meeting. It also cites Mumma's report on his team's attempt to detect methane on Mars using three different telescopes: NASA's 3-meter Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile, and the 10-meter Keck-2 telescope. The chapter provides the details of Mumma's measurements that show that the level of methane in the Martian atmosphere was about 10 parts per billion, averaged across the full atmosphere of Mars. It points out how all the early 2004 announcements about methane on Mars received immediate attention in the popular press.

AAS Nova and Astrobites as Bridges Between Astronomy Communities

Education and outreach in astronomy often focuses on communicating broad astronomical concepts. But how can educators and outreach practitioners also share current astronomical research results with students and the public, conveying both the process of science and the excitement of new discoveries? AAS Nova and Astrobites are two resources freely available to the astronomy community and the general public, intended to help readers learn about the most recent research published across the field of astronomy. Both supported by the American Astronomical Society, these two daily astrophysical literature blogs provide accessible summaries of recent publications in AAS journals and on the arXiv. As both AAS Nova and Astrobites directly distill original studies, these resources constitute a critical bridge between astronomy researchers and educators, outreach practitioners, and the broader astronomy community. The material on these two websites — which includes a total archive of more than 2,500 research study summaries — is written accessibly while still providing access to the original sources and outcomes. As a result, AAS Nova and Astrobites can be used by educators and outreach practitioners to easily introduce the latest in astronomical research studies into classrooms and outreach events.

AASTeX and the challenges of publishing in an increasingly interactive environment

In 2016 the American Astronomical Society (AAS) released two new versions of its LaTeX classfile, AASTeX. These were the first changes in over 11 years and included many new features to enhance an author’s ability to present their science in a format conducive to publishing in the AAS environment. While LaTeX is an excellent way to convey the written word, it lacks robust support for many desirable features including collaborative editing, large table support and figure interactivity. Bridging the gap between the old methods of writing and reviewing a printed manuscript and the new features the AAS has available and is working on implementing in a published HTML article is an ongoing challenge. This talk will highlight the new features of AASTeX and discuss how AAS publishing will move forward.

The Astrolabe Project: Identifying and Curating Astronomical ‘Dark Data’ through Development of Cyberinfrastructure Resources

As research datasets and analyses grow in complexity, data that could be valuable to other researchers and to support the integrity of published work remain uncurated across disciplines. These data are especially concentrated in the “Long Tail” of funded research, where curation resources and related expertise are often inaccessible. In the domain of astronomy, it is undisputed that uncurated "dark data" exist, but the scope of the problem remains uncertain. The “Astrolabe” Project is a collaboration between University of Arizona researchers, the CyVerse cyberinfrastructure environment, and the American Astronomical Society, with a mission to identify and ingest previously-uncurated astronomical data, and to provide a robust computational environment for analysis and sharing of data, as well as services for authors wishing to deposit data associated with publications. Following expert feedback obtained through two workshops held in 2015 and 2016, Astrolabe is funded in part by National Science Foundation. The system is being actively developed within CyVerse, and Astrolabe collaborators are soliciting heterogeneous datasets and potential users for the prototype system. Astrolabe team members are currently working to characterize the properties of uncurated astronomical data, and to develop automated methods for locating potentially-useful data to be targeted for ingest into Astrolabe, while cultivating a user community for the new data management system.

Origin of the Wang–Sheeley–Arge solar wind model

A correlation between solar wind speed at Earth and the amount of magnetic field line expansion in the corona was verified in 1989 using 22 years of solar and interplanetary observations. We trace the evolution of this relationship from its birth 15 years earlier in the Skylab era to its current use as a space weather forecasting technique. This paper is the transcript of an invited talk at the joint session of the Historical Astronomy Division and the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society during its 224th meeting in Boston, MA, on 3 June 2014.

The Development And Validation Of The Test Of Astronomy STandards (TOAST)

<p>The Test Of Astronomy STandards (TOAST) is a comprehensive assessment instrument designed to measure students general astronomy content knowledge. Built upon the research embedded within a generation of astronomy assessments designed to measure single concepts, the TOAST is appropriate to measure across an entire astronomy course. The TOASTs scientific content represents a consensus of expert opinion about what students should know from three different groups: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Research Council, and the American Astronomical Society. The TOASTs reliability and validity are established by results from Cronbach alpha and classical test theory analyses, a review for construct validity, testing for sensitivity to instruction, and numerous rounds of expert review. As such the TOAST can be considered a valuable tool for classroom instructors and discipline based education researchers in astronomy across a variety of learning environments.</p>

AGILE Highlights after Six Years in Orbit

AGILE is an ASI space mission in collaboration with INAF, INFN and CIFS, dedicated to the observation of the gamma-ray Universe in the 30 MeV - 50 GeV energy range, with simultaneous X-ray imaging capability in the 18-60 keV band. The AGILE satellite was launched on April 23rd, 2007, and produced several important scientic results, among which the unexpected discovery of strong <br />ares from the Crab Nebula. This discovery won to the AGILE PI and the AGILE Team the Bruno Rossi Prize for 2012 by the High Energy Astrophysics division of the American Astronomical Society. Thanks to its sky monitoring capability and fast ground segment alert system, AGILE detected many Galactic and extragalactic sources: among other results AGILE discovered gamma-ray emission from the microquasar Cygnus X-3, detected many bright blazars, discovered several new gamma-ray pulsars, and discovered emission up to 100 MeV from Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes. We present an overview of the main AGILE Data Center activities and the AGILE scientic highlights after 6 years of operations.

Gravity before Einstein and Schwinger before gravity

Julian Schwinger was a child prodigy, and Albert Einstein distinctly not; Schwinger had something like 73 graduate students, and Einstein very few. But both thought that gravity was important. They were not, of course, the first, nor is the disagreement on how one should think about gravity, which was highlighted at the June 2012 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, the first such dispute. Explored here are several views of what gravity is supposed to do: action at a distance versus luminiferous ether, universal gravitation versus action only on solids, finite versus infinite propagation speed, and whether the exponent in the 1/r2 law is precisely two, or two plus a smidgeon (a suggestion by Simon Newcomb among others). Second, an attempt is made to describe Julian Schwinger’s early work and how it might have prefigured his “source theory,” beginning with his unpublished 1934 paper “on the interaction of several electrons,” through his days at Berkeley with Oppenheimer, Gerjuoy, and others, to the application of nuclear physics ideas to radar, and of radar engineering techniques to nuclear physics. Those who believe that good jobs are difficult to come by now might want to contemplate the couple of years Schwinger spent teaching introductory physics at Purdue before moving on to the Radiation Laboratory in 1942.

The h-index in Australian Astronomy

The Hirsch h-index is now widely used as a metric to compare individual researchers. To evaluate it in the context of Australian astronomy, the h-index for every member of the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) is found using NASA's Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services. Percentiles of the h-index distribution are detailed for a variety of categories of ASA members, including students. This enables a list of the top ten Australian researchers by h-index to be produced. These top researchers have h-index values in the range 53<h<77, which is less than that recently reported for the American Astronomical Society membership. We suggest that membership of extremely large consortia such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey may partially explain the difference. We further suggest that many student ASA members with large h-index values have probably already received their Ph.D. and need to upgrade their ASA membership status. To attempt to specify the h-index distribution relative to opportunity, we also detail the percentiles of its distribution by years since Ph.D. award date. This shows a steady increase in h-index with seniority, as can be expected.