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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.

AAPT WM 21

Unlucky Stars Illuminate Massive Black Holes

galaxies

transients

black holes

astronomy

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.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


AAPT SM 20

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. 

technical paper

AAPT® is a strong professional physics science society dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in physical science education.

Winter and Summer National Meetings:
These National Meetings, held each winter and summer, are opportunities for members, colleagues, and future physicists from around the world to:

- participate in physics workshops
- meet and greet other physics educators
- form networks nationally and locally
- engage exhibitors and learn about the latest physics resources
- discuss innovations in teaching methods
- share the results of research about teaching and learning.

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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.

Lederman Science Center at Fermilab

Science World, a Vancouver-based science centre with a provincial mandate,&nbsp;is proud of our long-standing strong and mutually beneficial relationship with K-12 teachers. In the face of changing curriculum in 2015, we comprehensively surveyed&nbsp; teachers province-wide to understand how best to support them. I'll show how we turned the results of that survey into a multi-pronged action plan that included curriculum resources, professional development, and programming for classes near and far. As we rolled out the plan, we created new partnerships with formal and informal science education, and dove into new content (coding and computational thinking!), all of which&nbsp;helped us pivot to successfully support teachers through COVID times.

Informal and Formal Together: A Science Centre Supporting Schools

The science education that pre-service elementary teachers receive shapes their and their students'&nbsp;relationship with science. Elementary school teachers report&nbsp;low confidence and low enthusiasm when it comes to learning and teaching science. The Hands on Science (HoS) program at UT Austin was created as part of the successful UTeach program, to serve the unique needs of Applied Learning and Development majors. HoS consists of four required content courses: Physics, Chemistry &amp; Geology, Biology, and Astronomy &amp; Earth Climate. HoS classes were designed using best-practices from education research&nbsp;to meet the specific needs of future elementary school teachers. They differ from traditional introductory science courses in two ways:&nbsp;our students learn the specific content they will later be expected to teach, and they learn it&nbsp;through hands-on inquiry. They attain higher learning gains and show improved attitudes towards learning and teaching science, compared to students in&nbsp;traditional lecture-based intro classes.

Supporting Pre-Service Primary School Teachers with Hands on Science

OnRamps provides distance education courses via a dual enrollment model—in which UT-Austin faculty, learning specialists, and experts in college success partner with Texas high school (HS) districts to implement courses—to more than 38,000 students across Texas. The goal of OnRamps is to increase the number and diversity of students who are prepared to excel at the university level. OnRamps currently offers two introductory physics courses that have grown from a pilot program of 16 HS instructors and approximately 500 students to a current cohort of over 170 instructors and over 6,000 students across Texas. OnRamps provides yearlong professional learning and development—virtually and in-person—to these HS instructors to implement courses with fidelity, enhance expertise, and boost student engagement. We will explore these and other aspects of the OnRamps Physics instructor and student experiences.

OnRamps Physics: Experiencing UT-Austin at Texas High Schools

International Masterclasses offered by QuarkNet give students a chance to engage in authentic particle physics data analysis. In the spring of 2020, most of the masterclasses had to be canceled. In order to still provide the opportunity for students to engage in authentic data analysis and interact with physicists, QuarkNet offered the Big Analysis of Muons in CMS (BAMC). Teacher and student experience with this simplified version of the traditional masterclass will be discussed, including experience with lessons that teachers could do remotely with students to prepare them for the data analysis, user-friendly online tools for the data analysis, the talk by a physicist to provide background, and the live discussion of the results. The BAMC allowed students to experience how large collaborations can work together to produce a result and to learn how some of the concepts they were discussing in class are applied in current physics research.

Experience with the QuarkNet Big Analysis of Muons in CMS

Studies show that teacher stress is at an all-time high.&nbsp; In recent years, job related stress for teachers escalated due to role intensification, high stakes testing, school shootings, and societal unrest. The pandemic has only added to this stress.&nbsp; “Teacher well-being has been greatly impacted by the covid-19 pandemic (due to)…secondary trauma and shifting needs and demands (which leave) teachers on call day and night.” (5)&nbsp; Best practices to combat teacher stress include implementing support structures such as mentoring, team flexibility, and stress management training, in addition to actively promoting teacher health initiatives.&nbsp; However, the most impactful and lasting means of reducing teacher workplace stress would be the adoption of “ecological interventions” designed to shift the public’s perspective on teachers’ role in society. (4)&nbsp; This talk will discuss the overall success of various support structures on reducing teacher stress, as well as debate the feasibility of long term “ecological interventions.”

Feasibility of Ecological Interventions to Reduce Teacher Stress

One hundred and one years after his death, the breadth of William Crooke’s scientific work and discoveries still evokes surprise, as many may not be familiar with his achievements. Crookes started his scientific career at the Royal College of Chemistry when just 16, winning a scholarship within a year and becoming an assistant to the Director, August Hofmann. He was interested in photographic research but took a post as assistant at the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford and then became a teacher in Chester. He married Ellen Humphrey and changed positions several times as editor of various photographic journals. He founded Chemical News which remained his main source of income for the rest of his life. His subsequent career included the discovery of thallium, agricultural research, health research, the invention of the well-known radiometer, work on cathode rays and psychic research. He died on 4 th April 1919.

William Crookes (1832-1919): Scientific Communication, Physics, Chemistry and Psychic Phenomena

For traditionally in-person teaching environments, COVID-19 creates challenges to student use of academic support structures and organic growth of peer-to-peer learning communities. Simultaneously, collaboration, communication, and problem solving skills are important for success in higher education and beyond. To address this, a digital Collaborative Problem Solving Space (CPSS) and problem presentation assignment were implemented during class time in an introductory physics course. The CPSS gives students the time, space, and peer tutor and instructor support for working together on assignments, while the presentation component asks students to work through more difficult physics problems together. In this talk, I will discuss the implementation of the&nbsp; CPSS, and the results from course observation, student surveys, and student interviews assessing the CPSS in the context of the course learning goals. Perceived strengths and future revisions for better results will also be discussed.

Developing a Digital Collaborative Problem Solving Space

Despite their introduction in beginning physics courses, many students often struggle with the concept of reference frames when they begin their studies on relativity. To address this issue, I have focused my undergraduate research on creating an educational simulation that can be used as a teaching aide in lessons on inertial reference frames. The simulation uses an adjustable animation of a box falling off the back of a pickup truck from the perspective of two different reference frames. I have also prepared a teacher's manual and student worksheet which can be used&nbsp;with the simulation for a short, hands-on lesson in a classroom environment. In this presentation I will cover the simulation’s feature set, how it can be implemented into high school and first year undergraduate physics courses, and how the simulation can be improved to better supplement lessons.

Teaching Inertial Reference Frames Using Simulations

We analyze models of decaying dark matter, searching for shifts in $H_0$ and $\sigma_8$ to resolve the tensions between linear and astrophysical measurements. While previous searches have focused on dark matter with lifetimes on the order of the current Hubble time, we instead consider dark matter that decays between the time of last scattering and the era of large scale structure. We find that while decaying dark matter pushes parameter likelihoods in the right direction to resolve the Hubble Tension, the bounds ($\Omega$ = 0 to 10^-2 for lifetimes a tenth of the Hubble Time) on decaying dark matter are too strong to resolve the tension completely, a conclusion unchanged even when spatial curvature is allowed to vary. In addition, these bounds can be used to constrain theoretical models such as coupled axions from string compactifications.

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Unlucky Stars Illuminate Massive Black Holes

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