It all started with a routine sounding email received on February 26, 2018 with the subject heading of “Training and Exchange Opportunity – Caribbean/USA – astronomy/physics.” This was no routine email – it originated from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States, the United States Government Agency responsible for all science that is non-medical. They had sought us out in the Physics Department at The UWI to suggest that we should apply to the National and International Non-Traditional Exchange (NINE) Program with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) with a view to becoming a hub for radio astronomy in the Caribbean.
The NRAO is like the “NASA” of radio astronomy. This was no automatic process. It required a rigorous application process with several criteria and interviews to be satisfied, including the training of a UWI person to undergo a rigorous nine-week training programme at the NRAO headquarters in Charlottesville, Virginia. We leaped at the opportunity and were successful in our application. We were euphoric!
Jason Renwick was selected as the candidate chosen for training due to his ideal background for such a programme. He was an engineering student with programming capabilities and a track record in astronomy-related endeavours, having been a NASA intern twice, as well as an IBM intern.
Our successful application involved the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Science and Technology as the drivers of this initiative, together with the department of Computer Science and Information Technology and Physics department.
We are now officially the UWI-NRAO NINE hub for radio astronomy (Dr Shirin Haque, astronomer in the Physics Department, appointed as the programme manager). The hub team members include the deans of the faculties, Dr Brian Cockburn and Prof. Edwin Ekwue, heads of department, Dr Davinder Sharma (Physics), Dr Permanand Mohan (Computing and Information Technology) and Dr Fasil Muddeen (Electrical and Computer Engineering). The NRAO staff working closely with us are Lyndele von Schill (Director of Diversity & Inclusion), Brian Kent (NINE-VLASS Programme Manager and Scientist) and Anja Fourie (NINE Programme Manager and SARAO NINE Hub Lead).
The vision behind this NINE programme comes from the outreach arm of NRAO as highlighted on their website (https://info.nrao.edu/do/odi/broader-impact-programs/Nine) – “In the US there is also a strong desire to develop further our human capacity in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, especially within traditionally under-represented groups…The program is geared towards enticing the best and brightest, both nationally and internationally, into high quality programs designed to benefit the participant, each partnering location, and the radio astronomy community as a whole.”
The future of humanity is highly technological and the developments in this area are moving at breakneck speed. Radio astronomy is thus a powerful tool to excite, introduce and develop STEM capabilities in the Caribbean to prepare the upcoming generation to help fill the needs of the future in such fields locally and abroad. We saw the immediate rewards of engaging in such a programme out of the workshop on “How to display radio images with Python”, held at the Faculty of Science and Technology on September 15, 2018, facilitated by our now NINE-certified trainer, Jason Renwick. The NRAO issued certificates to the participants for becoming VLASS-certified on completion of the workshop. This created tremendous value for the participants who came with backgrounds from Physics, Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. The feedback from the participants of the workshop was highly inspiring, with requests for further workshops and introduction of radio astronomy courses at The UWI.
We as the UWI-NRAO NINE hub have hit the ground running. Five undergraduate students are also working on image processing from the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS) from NRAO using Raspberry Pis, and working on designs for a radio telescope. We have plans to be out in schools with kits to introduce and engage high school students and to promote STEM fields through radio astronomy in the future.
For thousands of years, the only band of the electromagnetic spectrum that allowed us to scan the universe was in the optical band, looking heavenwards with our eyes enhanced with the optical telescope just about 400 years ago. It was only in 1932 that this got extended to the radio band, with the first detection of radio waves by Karl Jansky who recorded radiation coming from the Milky Way. Since then, radio astronomy has been responsible for the detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation regarded as evidence of the Big Bang theory – the beautiful fossils of the infant universe.
It is in the field of radio astronomy that Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered the first pulsar (rotating neutron star), a discovery for which her supervisors contentiously received the Nobel prize in Physics (1974), excluding her. She has just now in 2018 received the $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in recognition of her then discovery of pulsars! Radio astronomy gives us another window to understand astronomical objects such as galaxies, stars, masers and quasars. It is also radio astronomy that leads and paves the way in the search for extra-terrestrial life.
At the department of Physics in The UWI, our foray into astronomy has been wide and varied. It all began with theoretical astronomy with the study of quasars, and moved onto the observation and monitoring of a spectacular quasar OJ 287 at our SATU observatory on the Natural Sciences rooftop building, in collaboration with our colleagues in Finland.
Solar astronomy soon was in the fold with collaboration with the William Hrudey Observatory in the Cayman Islands.
The cutting-edge field of Astrobiology soon put Trinidad on the map as well, with studies at our pitch lake and mud volcanoes as analogues for Titan (Saturn’s largest moon) and Mars respectively, with international collaboration.
It is all about trying to understand life in the Universe. This project has resulted in a publication in the prestigious journal “Science”. We now stand at the brink of another adventure in another aspect of astronomy – radio astronomy has arrived in the Caribbean! |
