The Milky Way Galaxy: blowing kisses at you from 10,000 lightyears away.

Image: STFC

It’s been a busy few months for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope, since we had our Acceptance Review at the start of the year. The team’s engineers have performed some final tests on the instruments to cross a few final t’s, dot the last i’s, both in Europe on the actual flight hardware and on spare parts over in the US.

My fellow test teamers and I are currently working on the calibration procedures for the instruments, or how to get the best scientific information out of the photons hitting the detectors. That should keep us busy for a few more months.

But the big news, fresh in my inbox, is that MIRI has now been officially cleared for shipping and delivery to NASA. This means that the panel charged with examining all our design documentation and test results are satisfied that MIRI is ready to be integrated with the rest of the spacecraft.

This is super good news for the whole team.

Of course, the further integration of MIRI won’t happen in a day either, and there’s still a long road ahead for the telescope, the instruments and the whole spacecraft before JWST will be ready for launch.

Next Wednesday we’re having a ‘do in London to present our work and our test results from MIRI to an audience of Big Wigs and Important People. A press conference has been planned so expect some MIRI-related items in the news next week as well (I hope). While I have got a little bit fond of Didcot and the Rutherford Labs after so many trips there, it does add a sense of occasion to have this event in a swanky venue in London.

I’ll be presenting the test results from the instrument’s low resolution spectrograph to round off the performance presentations – saving the best for last, obviously. (I kid, I kid.) See you there!

What I will not be telling teenage girls about is the paper published by Heidelberg (dot-)astronomer Janine Fohlmeister and Christiane Helling of St Andrews in Astronomische Nachrichten, and posted to astro-ph today (timing: coincidence?), on the career situation of female astronomers in Germany. The results presented are based on a survey taken by 61 female astronomers, based in Germany or German but based abroad. It’s a typically bleak read: no female Max Planck directors in Astronomy, leaky pipelines etc. I have a few issues with the survey, mostly that (i) the sample is really very small, and (ii) we can only really assess how work-life issues affect women specifically if we ask men the same questions. And the authors do also state that as a limitation.

They present lists of recommendations, which are also very sensible:

a motivating, encouraging, acknowledging boss/super- visor who was a good mentor and trusted in abilities, and who helped getting hands on excellent data and who introduced into networks
finding projects as well as self-motivation and working
independently
having role models for different topics and life phases
attending and giving talks at conferences, colloquia and
seminars
successful applications for grants, observing time and
soft money
stays abroad and flexibility, and
colleagues who helped to advance.

although I’d argue these apply to both male and female PhD students alike. As a woman, you really need all the above, and a supervisor who respects you irrespective of gender and who will stick up for you when others don’t.

More salient are the anecdotes offered by women taking the survey of comments they’ve had directed at them by men. These made me laugh, but of course it’s really quite depressing.

1. General designation (unconscious or conscious prejudice):
1.1. I know you would like to work, but if all women would stay at home, we would have much less un- employment.
1.2. For a woman your seminar was good.
1.3. You must be the secretary.
1.4. Female scientists are more masculine than normal women.
1.5. Special programs for women discriminate men.
1.6. Good morning gentlemen.
1.7. Dear Sir.
1.8. Ha ha, that is the alibi/quota woman!

2. Women are not treated independently of their partner:
2.1.    The husband of this (female) applicant has a better position, so she does not need a job.
2.2.    Why you want more money? Your husband is working!
2.3.  Will you stop your PhD education now that you married?

3. Pressing into the mother-role:
3.1. You have a diploma [i.e., M.Sc. degree], why do you also want a PhD? Now you can go home and have children.
3.2. Women who give birth dont come back.
3.3. To a woman with children: The permanent position is for mister XY, he has to support his family.
3.4. She wouldn’t come anyway (for a job) due to the children.
3.5. It is better for the children if the mother stays at home.

If I had taken the survey (sorry!) I might have contributed a few classics from my own experience over the years. Sometimes these comments are meant the way they sound: nasty and prejudiced, but often they are said in good spirits or as a joke, and answering back creates more awkwardness than it’s worth. I just smile, mentally relive some noted scenes from Kill Bill, and toast my glass of wine to the morons of the world with friends later on.

But basically people: if there’s only one woman in the room, anything you say that singles her out as being different is a no-no. When in doubt, replace “woman” with “old guy”, “non-white person” or “disabled person” and if that feels wrong, just don’t go there.

We often point the finger at publishing companies for standing in the way of this lofty ideal. They have long been able to make huge amounts of profit out of receiving content for free from scientists, publishing it, and then charging lots of money to libraries and the interested lay person for accessing it.

The debate has recently hit the mainstream, following a fed up blog post by mathematician Tim Gowers, a large petition signed by thousands of scientists, and statements in support of open access by the Wellcome Trust and the UK Government. I previously wrote about the Dutch research council NWO making funds available to its grantees for open access publication charges. My current employer, the Max Planck Society, are launching a new top-tier open access journal called eLife with the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. It seems like some powerful forces are at last aligning behind a more open way of doing science.

The Guardian, a big proponent of publicly available data, has been running a series of articles and blog posts on the issue. On Friday fellow astronomer-blogger Peter Coles of the University of Cardiff took his turn to make the case for open access.

I was particularly happy to see Peter tackle two particular angles in his article. The first is the need for access not just to publications but also to data. He’s right that astronomy does a pretty good job in that, but this aspect of access often gets overlooked in the broader science community. The experience with public data archives in astronomy is that they have massively increased the scientific output from our observatories.

The second interesting angle is that of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, which plays into the hand of the publishing companies. In the REF, UK universities are judged by the government on their research output. It’s a pretty  complex bureaucratic procedure (if you can’t sleep tonight, you can read all about it here) but essentially it comes down to this: the more papers a university’s researchers have published, the more citations they’ve gathered and the higher the journals’ impact factors are of these publications, the higher they will score. The higher they score, the more funding they receive from the Government. This system props up the prestige of the high-profile journals, which are almost always behind expensive paywalls.

Peter’s article is really good, so go read it.

Incidentally, the REF webpages actually contain some interesting publications beyond the actual guidelines. The Centre for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Leiden carried out a study for HEFCE in 2007 entitled “Scoping study on the use of bibliometric analysis to measure the quality of research in UK higher education institutions” – and yes, it is publicly available. Essentially it looks at how well we can assess the quality of an institute’s research by studying its bibliographic output, i.e. its journal papers and citation counts.

If you’re interested in such matters, it’s a pretty good read. Contrary to what I expected, it gives a balanced description of the pros and cons of using bibliometrics to assess scientific output and what it calls “intellectual influence”, including how using such methods affects the publishing behaviour of scientists. This is a very important point to consider. We will only become more open as a community if we are systematically rewarded for it; until then, we remain slaves to the impact factor and to our h-index.

I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot recently. As I’m approaching the 6-7 year post-PhD sweet spot for securing a permanent position, I’m frustrated by the narrowly defined measures of success I’m judged on, and how these are sometimes incompatible with being open. But I also know that it’s probably better to put up, shut up, and play the game to the best of my ability, so that one day I might be a curmudgeonly professor like Peter, instead of someone who was once an astronomer.

Segmented mirrors: a step change in astronomy (Image: TMT Observatory Corporation)

In a few weeks’ time I’m attending an EU-funded workshop in Marseille where a small group of scientists and engineers will come together to talk about new technology for observational astronomy. We’ll particularly discuss potential disruptive technologies, which are the most exciting kind: rather than just improve incrementally on the current techniques, a disruptive technology comes along and dramatically changes the way things are done.

A good recent example of a disruptive technology is data access from  mobile devices, whose potential was most beautifully and successfully captured by the iPhone. Mobile phones pre- and post-iPhone are entirely different devices. Who cares about voice anymore?

In astronomy, disruptive technologies over the centuries have repeatedly heralded big leaps in productivity from our telescopes: the introduction of the CCD in the 1970s-1980s; active optics and mirror lightweighting (and segmentation) in optical telescopes in the 1990s; the introduction of adaptive optics in the 1990s and naughties.

My own astronomy career started off with research into a disruptive technology: the fabrication of thin deformable mirrors, either for space-based active optics or ground-based adaptive optics, using lightweight carbon fibre-reinforced polymers (CFRP).  There are very particular joys and frustrations associated with this sort of work, after all it implies going against the grain and challenging an established paradigm. Also, technology is only disruptive if it actually works, so there’s a double hurdle to tackle. But working on something that you know might bring dramatic change is ultimately a lot of fun.

One thing I’ve learnt from talking to scientists and engineers from other fields is that technological innovation happens everywhere: in industry, in academia, in government, in people’s backyards and garages. It doesn’t even have to be a new gizmo: some of the most exciting innovations are new processes or methods. I’m doing a bit of reading around the web to get ideas, both from within astronomy and from other fields, at exciting technology that researchers are working on.

I wanted to pose the question here too: what is changing your game? What new technology is changing your field dramatically? What is your wish list for better productivity with your experimental facilities – be it telescopes, medical imaging devices, remote sensing cameras, or whatever thingybob I don’t even know the name of? Do you have any good reads on the subject? Please comment!

(I should have mentioned, by the way, that you really shouldn’t go looking for pretty pictures of bubbles in the paper. There’s only one.)

One man who says sensible things about statistics is neuroscientist Bradley Voytek. I really enjoyed the post he wrote today on O’Reilly Radar entitled “Automated science, deep data and the paradox of information”, on the potential of Big Data and its pitfalls. He states the following three laws of statistical analysis based on Arthur C. Clarke’s well known “Three Laws”:

1. The more advanced the statistical methods used, the fewer critics are available to be properly skeptical.
2. The more advanced the statistical methods used, the more likely the data analyst will be to use math as a shield.
3. Any sufficiently advanced statistics can trick people into believing the results reflect truth.

After spending the last few months knee-deep in histograms, correlation functions and statistical tests, these three points feel very relevant. Statistics, and the mathematical methods associated with them, are an immensely powerful tool for turning data into information – indeed when datasets become so large or multi-dimensional that one mind can’t gain an overview of them, and the Milky Way Project bubbles are perhaps just at that limit, it’s the only tool.

But it’s incredibly easy to “over-statisticise”, to venture so far away from the data that you lose sight of what is being measured. You can still produce clever-looking plots and  numbers that would convince all but the most pedantic of readers (which may or may not be your peer reviewer). It’s important to stay as close to the data as possible and find the right method to answer the question at hand – and that is the difficult bit with a statistical analysis.

The last couple of weeks saw the culmination for me of several months’ worth of hard work on a paper following up on our exciting new Milky Way Project catalogue. With the help of a number of MWP science teamers, I performed a statistical study looking at the correlation of the 5000-odd bubbles sample with a catalogue of known massive young stars detected by the infrared Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) satellite. What we found was that these two types of sources are strongly associated with one another, which is not unexpected. But we also noticed that the largest of our bubbles appear to have a disproportionally large number of massive young stars around their edges, which is a more exciting find. It confirms results from a very recent study by UK/Australian/German colleagues.

From previous studies of smaller samples of infrared bubbles, we know that many of these beautiful sources form around massive young stars or clusters, which clear away their surrounding cloud material with powerful UV radiation and stellar winds. The resulting cavity filled with hot dust glows brightly in the infrared (the red stuff), and the complex carbon-based molecules in the rims are excited by the stars’ UV photons (the green stuff).

Studying the correlation between massive young stars on the one hand and bubbles on the other, can tell us two things: (i) can we detect the massive young stars at the centre of the bubbles in the young stars catalogue, and (ii) is there any evidence of triggered star formation happening on the outskirts of the bubbles? The answer to (i) was pretty easy to test with our methods and resulted in a statistically resounding “yes”: the data tell us that we find loads of massive young sources in bubble interiors – far more than we’d expect from chance alignments.

Triggering is a special mode of star formation that we think might occur when energetic events, such as supernova explosions or bubble expansions, shock and compress molecular gas around them, causing dense pockets to collapse and form new stars in regions where this would otherwise not have happened.

Many papers have been published in recent years studying this phenomenon in theoretical calculations and simulations, and showing tentative evidence in observations. Triggered star formation is a potentially important phenomenon, as it might allow star formation in galaxies to sort of “daisy-chain” through a galaxy, which each generation of young stars providing the energetic kick into the surrounding gas to set off the next.

So in this paper, I show how the correlation between our bubbles and the catalogue of MSX sources (called the RMS catalogue, curated by the Leeds astrophysics group) paints a picture that is possibly consistent with triggered star formation happening around the largest of the MWP bubbles.

The really important caveat to the work is that this association does not imply that triggering is really happening. With bubbles, like with everything, correlation does not equal causation. The analysis I performed looks at a simple 2D projection of these objects on the sky, ignoring the 3D structure of both the bubbles themselves and of the Milky Way Galaxy. And demonstrating this causal effect between one newly born cluster and new stars forming in the same area is a really tough challenge that I’d argue very few authors have convincingly overcome (though I haven’t read every single paper).

I presented this work at the joint UK/German National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester earlier this week, which Rob wrote about on the Milky Way Project blog (with photographic evidence). Rob & Chris’ Recycled Electrons podcast also throws some random thoughts on the work around in typical style, and Will Gater interviewed Rob and me for Sky at Night magazine.

Of course, there’s an awful lot more to this work than I can capture here or in a 15-minute talk. If you’re interested, check out the paper on astro-ph but note that it’s not actually been accepted for publication yet – so all findings should be considered preliminary. I also submitted my Python code to the journal so that should be made available once the paper gets published as well. All data I used for the analysis are publicly available from either the MWP webpages or the RMS database.

The Manchester NAM was excellent fun. I heard some great talks and met lots of interesting likeminded people.  Since becoming a conference organiser myself I really appreciate a smoothly run event – so big thanks to the organisers for that.

Here’s the details of the paper:

Sarah Kendrew, Robert J. Simpson, Eli Bressert, Matthew S. Povich, Reid Sherman, Chris Lintott, Thomas P. Robitaille, Kevin Schawinski, & Grace Wolf-Chase (2012). The Milky Way Project: A statistical study of massive star formation associated with infrared bubbles ApJ submitted arXiv: 1203.5486v1

Comments welcome!

I’m curious: What do ya’ll think is the bit of professional astronomy that most needs to be changed? Regardless of government funding levels, is there one thing that’s holding us back from being the best astronomers we can be more than others? What’s our greatest weakness? Is it the disconnect between course work (theory) and practical astronomy (programming)? Disconnect between telescope time and funding? Not enough support for career tracks other than academia? Not enough open access to results? Competitive culture? Not competitive enough? If there was one thing you could change about our culture and traditions that would have the biggest impact on making astronomy more productive as a whole and an even better career choice than it is now, what would it be?

These questions by Kelle Cruz over on Astrobetter have sparked a pretty lively discussion, about careers, money, bad behaviour, and short-termism in science.

I was particularly piqued by one commenter, who seems to suggest that we shouldn’t make astronomy too attractive a career, as there are too many of us already. “We are all in it for the thrills of science.” Right. (In fairness, he does go on to mitigate the statement. But still.)

Got a bee in you bonnet? Go comment here.

The paper won’t be the photogenic blockbuster that Rob wrote for us,  but just in case you don’t share my histogram-fetish (… you simple soul!), I’ve managed to find space for one rather sexy bubble picture to add a bit of spice. If and when the paper gets accepted I’ll instruct the editor to place it on Page 3.

My own data adventures aside, this week was another heap of fun for the project. NASA put out a press release to mark the first data release. It didn’t get picked up in too many places – there was Astronomy Magazine, Space.com, and also a short piece in the Mail Online with obligatory pretty pics of the Spitzer images and our MWP heat maps. The Mail upped Eli Bressert’s “champagne bubble” quote to liken the Milky Way to a nougat-y chocolate bar.

If I’m being a pedantic scientist, I should add that neither of those analogies are actually very accurate. Champagne bubbles are maybe somewhat similar in that they’re lighter than the liquid they’re in, but our interstellar bubbles aren’t thought to be floating or rising through the interstellar medium. But they do expand. As for chocolate bars… No, that doesn’t work either.

At Milky Way Project HQ, we launched a new phase of the project. While we continue to collect your ‘regular’ bubble drawings, we’ve now added close-up images of bubbles that are already in the catalogue, for which we’re trying to get more precise sizes and thicknesses. Rob explains all here. Our drawing tools were fairly coarse, as some users had remarked, particularly for drawing smaller bubbles. So with these new images we will try to gather more precise measurements.

I’m really looking forward to the NAM conference later this month. I haven’t been to one of these meetings since the first year of my PhD (Dublin!), and they’re great for catching up with old friends and colleagues. Having it joint with its German equivalent meeting (the AG) means that both old and new friends will be at the meeting. Another factlet is that I’m actually half-Mancie, and although my association with the city is pretty patchy (what, you haven’t noticed my striking Northern accent?), it’s fun to be there.

Amateur astronomers are scanning the night skies looking for asteroids, comets and supernovae, and making vital discoveries in our quest for knowledge. Meanwhile space missions produce millions of images, but who is to say which ones are truly unusual and interesting? It is a job that computers struggle with, but one in which humans excel. This, more than ever, is the age of the amateur astronomer and Sir Patrick Moore explains how everybody can play a part whilst also enjoying the beautiful cosmos.

The programme will feature .Astronomy chief honcho  and Milky Way Project PI Rob Simpson. The programme is repeated several times over the week, check out times here. If you need any additional reasons to watch, apparently it’s also Sir Patrick Moore’s birthday. Happy birthday Patrick!