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Are we alone? Humans have been asking this question throughout history.&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; We want to know whether there is life beyond the Earth and whether any of it is intelligent.&amp;nbsp; Since the middle of the twentieth century we have had tools that permit us to embark on a scientific exploration to try to answer this old question.&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;We have discovered extremophiles in the most unexpected places on this planet and we have discovered that there really are far more planets than stars out there.&amp;nbsp; We haven’t yet found life beyond Earth, but there is a vast amount of potentially-habitable real estate to explore. As we look up and look out, we are forced to see ourselves from a cosmic perspective; a perspective that shows us as all the same, all Earthlings.&amp;nbsp; This perspective is fundamental to finding a way to sustain life on Earth for the long future.&amp;nbsp;

AAPT WM 21

A Cosmic Perspective: Searching For Aliens, Finding Ourselves

astrobiology

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The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

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AAPT SM 20

Are we alone? Humans have been asking this question throughout history.&nbsp; &nbsp; We want to know whether there is life beyond the Earth and whether any of it is intelligent.&nbsp; Since the middle of the twentieth century we have had tools that permit us to embark on a scientific exploration to try to answer this old question.&nbsp; &nbsp;We have discovered extremophiles in the most unexpected places on this planet and we have discovered that there really are far more planets than stars out there.&nbsp; We haven’t yet found life beyond Earth, but there is a vast amount of potentially-habitable real estate to explore. As we look up and look out, we are forced to see ourselves from a cosmic perspective; a perspective that shows us as all the same, all Earthlings.&nbsp; This perspective is fundamental to finding a way to sustain life on Earth for the long future.&nbsp;

technical paper

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In less than 25 years, the study of exoplanets has grown from a niche field to one with groups at most universities, international conferences, and prominent NASA and European missions. Exoplanet discoveries have moved from individual finds to announcements of hundreds of planets at a time. Currently, there are more than 4,200 confirmed exoplanets with the majority of these discovered by measuring the dimming as they pass in front of their host star. The discovery of thousands of exoplanets by NASA's Kepler Mission has shown that planets orbit most stars in our Galaxy and that potentially habitable planets are common. Scientists are working now to understand the characteristics of these planets, including their sizes, masses, and composition. The TESS Mission has so far found more than 50 nearby planets that can be targets for current and future telescopes to detect and characterize their atmospheres and look for indications of life.&nbsp;

Exoplanets -- Moving from Discovery to Understanding

We are living in an exciting time for astronomical exploration, with an explosion of exoplanet discoveries from ground and space-based telescopes. Many of these discoveries rely on the transit method-- the search for periodic brightness dips as a planet passes in front of its host star. As part of exoplanet transit searches, NASA space missions such as Kepler, K2, and TESS have returned millions of sequential images of the sky. What many people do not know is that these images are publicly available to all, whether astronomer, educator, or curious student. In this presentation, I will discuss opportunities to participate in the search for exoplanets by viewing and analyzing space telescope data. These include the Planet Hunters citizen science project, as well as open source software for those with basic programming knowledge. I will conclude with examples of discoveries made by students and amateur astronomers.

Exoplanet Discovery: From the Cosmos to the Classroom

Machine Learning (and its cousin Deep Learning) is rapidly making inroads into almost every academic and commercial endeavor.&nbsp; Astronomy is no exception.&nbsp; Researchers are developing tools to classify stars, identify quasars, correct adaptive optics for atmospheric noise, and many other applications.&nbsp; Learning these tools is becoming an essential facet of graduate study.&nbsp; However, I have not yet found anyone incorporating them into the undergraduate introductory astronomy lab.&nbsp; I recently taught a three-week general education course on machine learning for non-scientists, and I am adapting the activities from that course to an introductory laboratory sequence in an upcoming course on Galaxies and Cosmology.&nbsp; I will report on the success of my first course and how I plan to teach beginners to use Python tools in the Google Colaboratory on publicly available Astronomical data sets to deepen their understanding of the universe.

Bringing Machine Learning to Introductory Astronomy Labs

Experimental uncertainty and the epsilon-delta proof provide a rich example of a thread that weaves together topics in introductory physics, calculus, and engineering design. This thread presents an opportunity for deepening the connection between calculus and physics, strengthening conceptual understanding in both fields, and expanding students’ understanding of both experimental uncertainty and propagated error as constraints informing the design of an experiment rather than simply an unavoidable consequence of some procedure. We discuss the connections and describe several activities that help students explore the thread.

Connecting Experimental Uncertainty to Calculus and to Engineering Design

For the past four years, researchers at OSU have been collecting attitudinal and motivation data from physics graduate students at several universities across the Midwest The data collected pertain to factors associated with retention at the undergraduate level in STEM, but most of these factors have not previously be studied at the graduate level. These factors include sense of belonging, physics identity, self-efficacy, and cost, among others. In this talk, we will present a brief snapshot of some of these factors for students from different institutions, but at a single time point. We will also look at a longitudinal picture of how these factors tend to change as students progress toward a Ph. D.

Attitudinal and Motivational Factors in Graduate Students: Cross-sections and Evolution

We live in the new era of multi-messenger astronomy, with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo gravitational wave detectors partnering with telescopes around the world to study cosmic collisions of black holes and neutron stars. This new astronomy allows us to peer deeper into the cosmos and reach farther back into the history of our Universe than ever before. In the coming decades we will explore our Universe using detectors that reach across the gravitational wave spectrum, including a world-wide network of Earth-based detectors, the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), and the galactic-scale pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) such as the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational waves (NANOGrav). We have learned from the history of astronomy to expect the unexpected when opening a new window on the Universe and we now sit on the threshold of a wealth of exciting discoveries.

Astrophysics Across the Gravitational Wave Spectrum

As we approach the fifth anniversary of the first detection of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger, the LIGO and Virgo detectors have collected an impressive census of compact binary mergers in the local universe. By the end of the second observing run in August 2017 the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration claimed a total of 10 binary black hole mergers and one binary neutron star merger. The third observing run spanned April 2019 through March 2020, during which the collaborations alerted the astronomical community of 56 merger candidates.&nbsp; Thus far, the exceptional events announced by the collaboration include GW190425, GW190412, GW190814, and GW190521. I will present some of what this cosmic soundtrack has taught us about black holes in particular over the last five years, and what may lie ahead.

Adding a Cosmic Soundtrack

The recent preprint of the second catalog of transient gravitational waves* by the LIGO Scientific and Virgo collaborations reveals 39 events detected in the first half of the third observation run O3. Beginning Apr 1, 2019 and running 11 months, LIGO and Virgo interferometers recorded an average of one likely GW signal every six days, before suspending operations owing to the global pandemic. Novel detections in the first half of O3 include GW190521, a binary black hole merger that produced the first clear detection of an intermediate-mass black hole, and, GW190814, whose constituents include either the heaviest known neutron star or the lightest known black hole. In this talk we review detector performance in O3 and summarize the catalog of transients. We furthermore sketch the pathway to O4 in 2022, including detector upgrades to optics, lasers, and the addition of a frequency-dependent squeezed light source. *https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14527

LIGO Status and Plans

While most stars will happily orbit about the center of their host galaxy for their entire lifetime, a few of them are less fortunate. These unlucky stars get scattered towards the supermassive black hole at their galaxy center. There they will suffer a tidal disruption and the stellar debris will ultimately disappear into the black hole. These stellar tidal disruptions events are rare and result in a spectacular flare of electromagnetic radiation. Visible from radio to X-ray wavelengths, tidal disruption flares are a unique probe to study massive black holes. Over the last decade, astronomers have gotten increasingly adept at finding these events. The advent of optical transient surveys has accelerated this effort, resulting in a large number of (often unexpected) discoveries. In this talk I will review this progress, demonstrating some the applications of tidal disruption events as tools to study black holes and their host galaxies.

Unlucky Stars Illuminate Massive Black Holes

Particle physics shapes our view of nature in a fundamentally new way. Unfortunately, most students in today’s public schools never have a chance to learn about the strangeness and beauty of the world of elementary particles. Fermilab’s Lederman Science Center (LSC) houses many interactive exhibits that are available to the public to explore particle physics from a child’s point of view. LSC exhibits introduce students to the basic concepts behind Fermilab’s science—scale of the universe, symmetry in nature, fundamental particles and forces, accelerators and detectors. These exhibits kick-start and sustain long-term interests that involve sophisticated learning. We believe that learning is broader than schooling, and informal science environments, such as the LSC, play a crucial role in developing the STEM workforce, and stimulating science literacy.

A Cosmic Perspective: Searching For Aliens, Finding Ourselves

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