It's been a long time since I've posted to the blog here in long-form writing, but it's time to start again and catch everyone up. I'd like to start with a post I made on facebook, reflecting on turning 45 yesterday:
I also don't post much on facebook these years (this was my first in a long time), and most of my contacts there are family and friends from my 20s and early 30s, with a few new friends and colleagues sprinkled in. I have been much more active on twitter the last decade - https://twitter.com/PlavchanPeter - but I've also been tailing off there as well the past year. I'm not sure where I will journey next in the social media landscape.
As I reflect on my 45th birthday, I am a father of a 9 year old son and twin two year old sons, a husband for 12.5 years, share our beloved 13 year old dog Oliver, a one year old bearded dragon Sunny, and a pair of water frogs we acquired from my wife's work at the start of the pandemic 3 years ago. 2.5 years ago we bought a house for the second time and I earned tenure at a top research institution that is growing, young and innovative. I get to do for a living what I love as a professor of physics and astronomy, a career I've arguably dedicated my entire adult life to achieving. I lived my first 18 years mostly in upstate NY, my second 18 years in Los Angeles, and I'm halfway through my third 18 year stanza in Fairfax, Virginia.
Woah, I’ve been a dad for 20% of my life; nuts. Lincoln loves swimming, and being on a baseball team. He exudes confidence in school and life (must be from his mother!). Theo is clearly our sports child even at two years old swinging a bat, shooting a basketball, kicking a soccer ball, throwing a football, and even almost swimming. Lincoln never showed that kind of sports interest at his age, but did for other things like guitar and violin. In other ways, Theo is a mini-Lincoln, and Theo adores his older brother. Grant is built like me, and it's clear he's going to the biggest of our three children; he is so chock full of energy he cannot sit still, loves vehicles and buses and the color yellow. I enjoy watching them grow up, as Lincoln shares almost exactly the same age gap (6 years, 10 months) between himself and the twins as I did with my younger brother (differing only by 4 days).
I'm decidedly middle-aged, but I don't feel it in my head. While 45, I have a very young family to raise. My body on the other hand is definitely starting to show signs of aging, and I know I am no longer in my prime. Advil is more of a go-to after a home maintenance or yard day of work. I continue to live with my heart condition and defibrillator and associated anxiety, my “sword of damocles” reminder that life is short and to be cherished. My heart is also heavy from the loss of my mother to cancer a year ago. I’ve started placing a greater emphasis on steering away from negativity in my life, and renewed interest in being healthier, talking to a nutritionist regularly and my preferred exercise in the form of home maintenance projects, yard work, bike riding, and walking to our community pool.
Professionally, I’ve accomplished much. I am the Director of our Observatories at Mason, led a pending NASA PIONEERS mission proposal, started re-spinning up a reinvented mission concept, co-led a NSF INCLUDES pilot study proposal that was selectable for funding, continue to lead a large research team (~10-15 students) and a large observatory team of ~10 students. I was also recently elected as governance chair of the 300+ faculty in the College of Science, after serving as a deputy (chair pro team and secretary) the past three years. I am reminded of my mom in this role, who served as the head nurse of the 400 nurses in her medical group towards the end of her career; I know she would be proud of this, and I take service to my institution seriously as much as my time can permit.
I have a large number of impactful science papers I really, really wish I had more time to finish (this summer?). Research grant funding has unfortunately trailed off, and I blame the pandemic and caregiving impacts on my productivity there, but I am planning a comeback and making long-term investments. I do have a Congressional Community Project pending if Congress passes it as part of an annual budget (a big if this year!). If funded, I will lead the establishment of a Center for Space Exploration at George Mason. AND, I was a Co-I on a related large University strategic investment proposal to do a large STEM workforce development project in the college of science focused on making research more equitable and accessible to students.
In terms of outreach, I coordinate a talk series in partnership with the Smithsonian Associates ( last fall we looked at the private space industry revolution and this year we are doing a Solar System grand tour: https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/solar-system-earth ), started a summer astronomy research internship program for high school students that had 50 students enroll last year and a similar number this summer ( https://schar.gmu.edu/programs/executive-education/five-week-young-astro-scholars-internship-astronomy-data-analysis-and ). I’m also starting a space camp for middle school students in partnership with the Pearl Project Institute at our Interstellar Dreams Space Center ( https://science.gmu.edu/spacecenter ). Last year I also co-“launched” George Mason’s first annual Space Day which was a huge success with over 1400 registrations, and we’re planning the second, bigger and better event ( https://science.gmu.edu/spaceday ). I give more talks and coordinate more events than I can keep track of. I've gotten to share a stage with two astronauts, one in person, and one via zoom whom I've also met in person (incredibly humbling!).
So, I have a lot to be proud of professionally. One of my PhD students defended this spring, and two more will have advanced to candidacy by the end of the month, with two more remaining in my group. It’s a good thing I’m down to 4 PhD students, two in their final stages, from a high of seven! My research group is much more manageable than it was 3 years ago. I do take pride in supporting our students, staff and faculty equitably and being an asset to my institution.
So, onwards. Papers to write, programs to lead, life to enjoy, a family to raise. With all this going on, I really haven’t had any downtime to watch TV shows or movies or read books outside of work for fun (with the exception of Ted Lasso and anything Star Wars). I’m fairly ok with that, but it would be nice to continue a slow smooth landing professionally over the next few decades. That will mean I will have to prioritize, frankly something I’m terrible at with so much I want to do and accomplish.
I still day dream about a few grand challenges in physics I’d like to spend time thinking about, and find more time to write and work on my writing regarding these thoughts. Now’s the time! For example, I completely and creatively reinvented our intro astronomy lecture course this past semester - it’d make for a great new textbook. I’ve got a few paper ideas waiting to be explored. If my mission proposal gets selected, that will occupy the next 5+ years of my career. That’s all professional, but I also plan to spend more time with my children, and even teaching Lincoln more science and math now that he’s 9 and I can better connect with him. I have to shed more of the bullshit in life to make more time for all of these things that matter.
Personally, someday it’d be nice to have a boat to take out on all the waterways here in the DC region, a camper, and eventually maybe a second home at the Jersey shore (rising sea levels make that the most impractical). I day dream about a major future home renovation to this house too (add a new master over over our garage, a front/side/back deck, and new siding and 1st floor windows), but none of that will really be financially viable for 5-10+ years. Financially, life has been rough making ends meet raising three children and managing debts from years of infertility past. Note, I have zero regrets incurring these debts - they were well worth it to have the full family we are now incredibly fortunate to have, when so many other families who struggle with infertility are not nearly as fortunate as we have been; the consequences are just that these other dreams will be deferred. I’m also grateful we qualified to buy a home at an ideal time at an amazing interest rate, and we’ve benefited a lot from that (our net worth is a little less negative than it would be otherwise!), with no intentions of moving any time soon.
Over the past 2.5 years, I renovated the flooring for most of our first floor, installing hardwood, knocked down a wall b/t the kitchen and dining area, and renovated our kitchen entirely to give my wife her dream kitchen, (well, I’m almost done, one row of cabinets, some trim and caulk and backsplash tiles left). I personally built a backyard fence when we moved in, and turned our overgrown brush and trees area into a proper backyard with grass growing throughout, playhouses (plural!) and a sandbox and climbing dome I built too. I became handy out of necessity. The children love the backyard, and it brings me such joy to see them use the yard. It's my little piece of heaven. Some smaller home renovations also await to our three bathrooms, and our bonus room that could easily be converted to a fourth bedroom with the addition of a door and closet. And I’d like to build a shed in the backyard too...
Ok, that’s enough reminiscing on my 45th! I could go on for pages... and I don't have an easy way to bring this to closure, because my story isn't done yet.
This articleabout the early days of astronomers' reactions to the launch of starlink haunts me, and the time & leadership lost that resulted. As the Director of the Rubin Observatory Tony Tyson himself said "All was happy and nice with our heads buried underneath the sand.”
As I read yet another article on the battle for the night sky, it seems like astronomy leadership made some key missteps. Now, hindsight is "2020", we've been living through a pandemic, but here's my thoughts on how we failed to react nimbly to this disruptive change:
First, leadership thought too narrowly. Tyson fixated on 7th magnitude for darkening the satellites. Why? The satellite brightness upper limit was driven by how the Rubin Observatory, with it's ~$0.5B US taxpayer cost & personnel could mitigate satellite trails to "denoise" science images, which "by gosh ... pure coincidence" (put Tyson) also put the satellites beyond the gaze of the unaided eye view of the natural beauty of the night sky. But this narrow focus on Rubin Observatory by Tyson at worst ignored and at best minimized the impact on... every other telescope on the planet, including smaller professional telescopes without the resources to procure and implement imaging de-noising of satellite trails, such as our 0.8m at George Mason Observatory. This short-sightedness extended to amateur telescopes, binoculars, and sidereal-tracking mounted DSLR cameras for amateur astronomers, wide-field astro-photography, education and outreach sharing the beautiful splendor of the night sky just beyond the gaze of the unaided eye. This lack of vision extended to radio astronomy already inundated with wifi and cell towers corralled to radio quiet "zones" such as the US taxpayer funded Green Bank Observatory and Owen's Valley, now facing an impenetrable source of radio light pollution.
We've seen this before with the pollution of city lights and the escape of astronomers to remote dark sky sites, to children who grow up in urban areas and reach adulthood never once gazing upon the wonders of the Milky Way in all its splendor. No, leadership thought too narrowly, ignoring the impacts beyond the light pollution, such as the aluminum pollution of the upper Earth atmosphere, aka the space industries giant backyard trash fire, the potential for the Kessler syndrome. We ignored the global implications from our US-centric elitism, the lack of regulation in space, how a single private US billionaire can change the night sky for a planet of billions of humans, AND quadrillions of other life forms that make use of the night sky for everything from navigation for dung beetles to reproduction with the lunar cycle for fish.
Second, leadership reacted too narrowly. As captured in the lede article of this thread, Tony Tyson tried to solve this problem "engineer to engineer" and "wanted to avoid public conflict". In the early days of Starlink, I wondered where the eff was the Rubin Observatory. There was no public announcement; no public outcry. Now I know; the VRO tried to solve a grand-challenge big-science problem on their own, a recipe for disaster. Pandora's rocket had already launched; it was too late to expect a solitary small-scale, narrow-focus effort to bring the starlink genie back down to Earth. It was also effin' elitist to assume Rubin Observatory engineers alone could solve all the concerns above. This was incredibly shortsighted and insulting to the rest of the professional astronomy community, amateur astronomers, and the rest of the planet.
So, while Rubin Obs was off working in isolation (a private corporation by the way), what was the leadership of the American Astronomical Society for professional astronomers doing? They wanted "to avoid a confrontation that could damage the SpaceX partnership" and declined legal help.When the NEPA article challenging the pollution effects came out, the AAS leadership was declining multiple offers of legal assistance. And it took a competitor, ViaSat to mount a legal challenge. Are you effing kidding me? No, the AAS and Rubin Obs leadership, with the privilege to be able to get Elon Musk on a phone call, screwed this one up. Big time. “I don’t read the FCC filings for entertainment purposes,” Tyson says. “On balance, my bad.” Exactly.
So the scientists of the American Astronomical Society did what they could in the vacuum of leadership, they formed a committee with collaboration with SpaceX. “Several of us were compared to Neville Chamberlain, for having sold out the astronomical community.”
Third, we were then completely oblivious. Sure we attacked the main thesis for a low-latency low-cost global internet service for rural populations worldwide as financial hogwash:
We puzzled at the breeze of approvals from the FCC. But we missed the customer who was there for Starlink since Day 1, even before the first batch of 60 launched on 11/19/2019: the US military. Here's a Reuters article from 10/22/2019 hiding in plain sight of the Air Force partnering with SpaceX. Then the Army followed in March 2020. It wasn't just about the cost, it was the low latency and the military capabilities. Sure, the role the military may have played in the ease of the FCC approval is pure speculation, but astronomers were oblivious to another consequence of the military applications: every capable nation would want their own satellite network, increasing their number by an order of magnitude. Leadership at the AAS and VRO naively assumed that either the satellite companies would fail like OneWeb, or older examples like Iridium, or 1-2 companies would "win" the race to build them, limiting the total number of satellites on orbit. No, we were oblivious to the idea that all countries would want their own networks for military applications.
A global problem requires global engagement, and here again the US leadership has fallen woefully short. Astronomers are still working from the ground up, albeit too slowly to have an impact. SATCON1 was held in the summer of 2020, but it focused on the scientific impacts on astronomy. Everything else was deferred until SATCON2 in the summer of 2021. Since then, SpaceX managed to launch over 1400 operational satellites in that time. There was no pause, there was no regulation, there were no hearings resulting from the NEPA legal arguments against the pollution of satellite networks. The FCC has continued to approve what SpaceX wants to do, even over the objections of Amazon.
I applied to join one of the four working groups as a director of a 0.8m Observatory, and as geographically proximate to the US policy makers on the Hill, but I was not selected to be included. Frankly, I'm ok with that decision, I had enough going on in my life at the time. SATCON1 and 2 however are grass-roots efforts starting like how environmental movements started in the past - poorly resourced and being bullied around by those in power. Heck, I'm not even sure what the International Astronomical Union is doing, but it's not even making enough of an impact for me to hear anything about it and I'm a professional astronomer.
Frankly, right now what we need is leadership. We need AAS leadership in the US through engagement with the executive branch and Congress.We need international dialog at the UN and peer-to-peer.We need interdisciplinary international regulation of space and space industries. I'm hoping it's not too late. This grand challenge is much bigger than satellite communication networks, and much bigger than astronomy. What we have now is woefully inadequate. Sure, it's not as big of a grand challenge we face as a global society such as climate change, but we've been far too short-sighted about regulating space and space industries during the past two years.
I was recently quoted in The Verge, in an article shared widely about file and directory structure mental models, and operating system user data access:
While the article may have sensationalized the growing changes in student mental models for file organization, it does highlight how our use of computing evolves with time in everyday personal computing, and how those habits and skills directly impact the education and research that we do in astrophysics. The article in particular highlights how the pervasive use of “search” over the past two decades since the birth of internet search engines in the late 1990s, and its later sophistication and advances in operating systems and apps, both on computers, tablets and phones, has changed how many of our younger generations organize and access data of all kinds.
Older generations of computer users have long since internalized the ideas of folders and sub-folders, to arbitrarily deep levels of file organization. The concepts of files and folders in a hierarchical structure for computing dates back to ERMA 1 and the Xerox Star in 1958 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_(computing) ), and of course back to their real-world paper counterparts before computing.
Interestingly, there is nothing fundamental about the organizing of data into “directories”, and really metadata tables and databases, tags, and other types of indexing as search engines generate are perfectly different ways of organizing data. It’s just that many of us are so used to the concept we take it as a necessity. However, at the bit and byte level, operating systems map the data in entirely different ways into linearly addressable data array storage devices, be it solid-state drives, or the now vanishing technology of spinning platters of magnetic storage hard drives, or even older practically extinct floppy and magnetic tape drives. Even our storage devices have changed dramatically in a human lifetime, so there’s no reason to be surprised that the ways in which we access that data through software will also evolve as computing power advances.
Indeed, much research software these days, which often finds its way into educational use, relies on the assumption of data organized by files and directories. Many of our operating systems do too, but everyone who has ever heard of a Windows Registry knows that databases and other forms of data organization are just as prevalent and important for operating systems.
In astronomy, we often storage data in “raw” text files, csv files, or for imaging and spectroscopic data, FITS files, a relatively ancient data format ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS) first invented 40 years ago in 1981; at least I am slightly older than the FITS file format! When the IDL programming language reigned supreme in astronomical data analysis during a bitter battle with the IRAF data analysis tools, it was common for scientists and students to pass around IDL save, or “.sav” files. Nowadays, as Python’s reign of astronomical computing is in full bloom (with some contenders like Julia and others with minor or specialized use like R, Matlab, C/C++, Fortran and yes, still IDL), many students and scientists are passing around “npz” files, pythonized compressed data files for storing data structures either indexable with integers or keys. Python has gained such traction and use within astronomy for many reasons, only a few of which being it is free and thus accessible, and syntactically much simpler with the abstraction of data types and use of whitespace for nesting. Astronomy also got heavily invested in Python through such efforts as the astrobetter blog led by Dr Kelle Cruz (https://www.astrobetter.com/ ), as well as the AstroPy set of libraries and utilities, which harkens back to the last generations use of iraf tools and utilities and the IDL astronomy library ( https://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/ ).
Computing plays a fundamental role in astronomy, from the control of hardware for data collection, to the analysis of that data with advanced Bayesian and frequentist statistical tools, to the implementation of theories in computational models for interpreting that data. Files and folders are just a small piece of that, but even major archives such as the NASA Exoplanet Archive, SIMBAD, Vizier, NED, MAST, and iRSA increasingly rely on building more and more sophisticated search and data visualization tools for the organization and efficient user access to data. Imagine if the GAIA data release ( https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/earlydr3 ) consisted of solely a set of files and folders, with no way of searching by right ascension and declination, or star name. Search is here to stay, as well as the indexed databases that underlie them for the organization of the data contained therein.
It is interesting to ponder what the future of computing and its role in astronomy will be. And to figure that out, one should look no further than our current undergraduate and graduate students, how they organize and access data. Many organize their data (or not) within the Downloads, Desktop and Documents folders of whatever operating systems they use, and rely increasingly on operating system search, recent file histories and similar for access their data (and apps and mail!). Some use tags, and some use sophisticated networks of nested directories. Regardless, search will clearly play a critical role in the future of computing in astronomy, but to date, searching of files is not at a sophisticated level within programming languages such as python; if anything most basic capabilities resemble the wildcard command line searches of previous generations. Maybe that is because Python is a programming language built by the previous generation, and many of these sophisticated search tools for data access rely on languages like Python and other modern OS computing languages for development by programmers.
To put my futurist hat on, it’s interesting to imagine a revolution in computing starting with operating systems, and the abandonment of files and directories, one in which data is organized in a fundamentally different way, and indexed in database like structures and accessed in a search-centric operating system from the ground up. Whatever the future of computing ends up looking like, whether it involved graphical programming languages, artificial intelligence, or other cutting edge ideas, astronomy will go right along with it, and the next generation of astronomy computing tools will be developed by today’s students. We’re just getting started on the role of computing in our handheld phones and wearable devices.
This week a student in FOTO, our astronomy club, asked me what the diameter of the Ash telescope dome is. I didn’t know, and suggested we get a measuring tape. Instead, they pulled out an app on their iPhone 13, equipped with LIDAR-like capabilities, and made a decent 3D model of our Observatory with a LIDAR 3D app, on the spot:
The answer was 20 feet, as it turned out. It’s crazy to think about how hard generating this kind of 3D model would have been 20 years ago. And that in a nutshell encapsulated for me how the our use of technology progresses and its role in astronomy computing evolves. While I have an iPhone with the Measure app (not as nice as the LIDAR 3D app), I never thought to make the measurement with my phone. It’s interesting to ponder a day 20-40 years from now or more where Python and AstroPy are considered obsolete tools for astronomy data analysis, and no one uses FITS files, or npz files, or files at all for that matter.
The term vs. tenure "class" divide among faculty at institutions of higher education is a nationwide result of decades of university policies relying on "cheap" term and adjunct labor. Whereas 50 years ago term faculty might have made up a small <10% fraction of faculty (ballpark guess), we are now to the point now where term faculty make up a substantial (>30% at George Mason) fraction of faculty. Term and tenure line faculty come with different job descriptions and expectations for performance, but there are term faculty that work "harder" than tenure faculty, and that can be on multiple axes - research, teaching, service, leadership, etc. However, term faculty are often "stuck" in their track.
To use my own personal experience on this, at Caltech from 2008-2014, I was an assistant staff scientist for five years until I was cross-promoted to an assistant research scientist in my final year there. Like faculty, we had a "class" system as well; we were divided into "staff" and "research" scientist tracks. The expectations were also different for each track - 80/20 vs 50/50 programmatic / research focus. Of course, the research scientists liked to joke it was 80/80, because programmatic work didn't decrease, but that's another story. Like term faculty, the staff scientists were paid less than the research
scientists. We also had promotions within rank - assistant, associate
and full - just like faculty. Just like for term vs. tenure faculty, there were higher expectations of leadership, publications and grant funding among the research scientists relative to staff. There was also more job security on the research track. The similarity to the term vs. tenure lines was intentional. The research scientists also usually occupied the leadership roles. Unlike the term/tenure faculty example, there were many more staff than research scientists.
For me what made this "class" system tenable at Caltech was a key difference - there was a clearly defined and communicated pathway by which one could transition from the staff to the research track. The criteria: performing at the level of the research track scientists. Incidentally, that was also the criteria for promotion within each track, demonstrating performance at the next level already (with a written description of what that meant). Yes, it meant working harder, carving out extra time for research when we already had high-levels of programmatic burdens.
I am unaware of any University that has a clearly communicated pathway from term to tenure faculty, and perhaps that is a result of the administrative drive nationwide to minimize the number of tenure faculty. However, I think we could pursue defining such a pathway in future years - by we I mean my institution. These issues already often come up for term faculty and research staff; the lack of a clear path from non-tenure to tenure lines leads to inconsistencies, unfairness, and frankly term faculty leaving their institutions. This problem has been brewing nationwide for decades as the fraction of term faculty has steadily increased; long-standing trends in administrative policies to save money are coming home to roost.
At Mason, we don't have a clear, written policy on a "sideways" promotion across tracks for faculty, as Caltech did for its science staff. There doesn't exist a national solution to this problem. However, if we could develop a "sideways" promotion criteria, it could be a game-changer in terms of showing how to alleviate the class structure that exists between term and tenure track faculty. As of now, there's an insurmountable barrier, short of winning an open job search. Having a coherent and solid annual performance review process in place is a prerequisite. Caltech did have such an annual review process - We submitted written reports and our bosses wrote written, one page evaluations. Then we had a sit down, in person meeting on every year to review. I used to dread the meetings, but they were always relatively informal and collegial; I grew from them as a scientist and I got honest feedback on my job performance and where I could improve. Our boss and then an ombudsman for the scientists would attend. The ombudsman - a head of science staff - helped protect against favoritism of individual bosses, and got a 30,000 foot view of the whole organization to help guide the bosses too.
There is also a way to sell this to a Provost or University administration: at Caltech, since this process existed, it enabled Caltech to stack the decks heavily with more lower-paid staff scientists, and relatively fewer better-paid research scientists - even more extreme an imbalance compared to the typical ratio of term to tenure faculty. By allowing the pathway for term faculty to become tenure line, I think most Provosts would fear that this would cost them more money. But instead the opposite happened for Caltech - the staff scientists knew what they had to do to get to research faculty as it was clearly communicated; they had to be the best, and it was just very hard. Very few of us successfully made the transition, but many of us tried. This meant more grants, and more publications, this meant more commitment and effort from everyone. As a result, Caltech was able to grow its staff of scientists to be much larger than its research faculty; the role of research scientist was reserved for those that had consistently over-performed for years. And thus I think this would be consistent with long-term trends for Universities to increasingly rely on term faculty. As much as we malign this situation, and would rather increase the number of tenure-line faculty, this nationwide trend does not seem to be reversing any time soon.
The system at Caltech wasn't perfect; far from it; I did decide to leave one of the top institutions in the world for my field of study to become an assistant professor at Missouri State. I had burned out at Caltech. However, if we don't do something like this, as the number of term faculty only continues to grow (w/r/t to the number of tenure faculty) with no outlet, I think the resentment and class structure we have will only get worse. There needs to be a way to tunnel through the barrier. Anyway, that's my two cents tonight. Let me know what you think.
Respondus and other similar webcam monitoring tools discriminate against students of color, invade the privacy of students' home learning environments, foster a lack of trust and mutual respect between faculty and students, and are plainly inhumane and degrading when some students choose to pee themselves rather than get flagged for cheating.
A common retort from faculty and administration is that Respondus and similar tools are necessary to combat rampant cheating during the pandemic. Indeed, some course assessments have seen increased violations of academic integrity during this pandemic, and we agree that these present challenges to the faculty that teach these courses. There are additional legitimate challenges for faculty to retool their curriculum and assessments during this pandemic, with no extra compensation and no extra time.
Namely, many faculty work like the Texas power grid - we operate at capacity, and some would say over-capacity even before this pandemic began; the slightest stress on our system of time management causes a cascade of failures (and in the case of the Texas power grid real harm, tragedy, and loss of life). We don't have the spare capacity to adequately adjust our curricula and assessments, and many faculty also have young children in virtual school at home or to provide caregiving for. It's the stuff of anxiety-driven nightmares.
However, some faculty are simply privileged to be ignorant of the inequities in the use of Respondus and similar tools. Other overworked faculty are aware of its limitations, but weigh the trade offs in investing their time to switch assessments away from Respondus, and decide equity is not a relatively high enough priority. Still others are simply at a loss on how to retool assessments in classes with >50 students; oftentimes alternative assessments require more effort in preparation and grading, and more contact hours which do not scale easily with no corresponding increase in the number of faculty, teaching assistants and learning assistants. Some term faculty are forced to use Respondus to maintain consistent standards across multi-section courses with multiple instructors. We simply don't have the spare capacity to adjust.
So, rather than ban Respondus outright, administrations permit its use; it is "convenient", an easy hi-tech "solution" in challenging times. In fact, many institutions are upgrading and renewing Respondus contracts to avoid compromising the academic freedom of faculty. Higher ed administrations are anticipating that the fraction of courses offered virtually online after the pandemic will remain significantly elevated compared to the "before times"; online courses are a perceived driver of revenue growth and student demand, regardless or whether or not this is in the best interests of the student academic preparation. The pandemic has given the perception that this trend in higher education towards more online courses has abruptly accelerated because of the pandemic. Thus we are using student revenue, and in the case of public institutions taxpayer dollars, to pay a private, for-profit company for the privilege of discrimination.
However, in my opinion, I don't think faculty should have the "academic freedom" to discriminate against their students of color, the "academic freedom" to invade their privacy, nor the "academic freedom" to inhumanely degrade their students. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard. To take the logic of using Respondus to its absurd extreme, imagine if the administration of colleges could require faculty to use Respondus to monitor the faculty, to ensure that we are lecturing from home at the times we are supposed to be, monitoring us for our job performance. I imagine then that Respondus would quickly go away and stop discriminating against and unnecessarily stressing our students.
Instead, let's reset the relationship between students and faculty. Let's question the assumptions that lead to the use of Respondus and similar tools this pandemic. Instead, let's foster trust and mutual respect rather than adversity with our students. I recall the honor code of my undergrad institution "No member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community." That foundation of trust, instilled in all incoming students at orientation, set the tone of the relationship between faculty and students from the start. We had take home exams as the norm in the late 90s, no webcams required (and the internet was there, but still new then). Yes, some students will still take unfair advantage of that trust, and there needs to be checks and balances in place for genuine violations of academic integrity as are the norm at all institutions. Also, Caltech is a unique institution with its small enrollment, high contact hours, challenging student assessments, and selective admissions, with its own additional well-known institutional shortcomings; not everything can scale.
Faculty can retool our assessments, if given the time, compensation, and spare capacity to do so. As it is, academic curricula and assessments are overdue for an overhaul in the modern era of google search. If an exam question can be answered with googling for the answer, are you really assessing learning? In some circumstances, you are instead assessing memorization. There can and should be new goals for learning and assessment that go beyond memorization. Let's re-evaluate our foundational assumptions of our courses - what do we want our students to take away from the courses, and how can we redesign assessments for those goals in the current learning environment? Instead of using technology to "innovate" surveillance, let's use technology to innovate assessment, to customize student assessments, provide more contact hours or make better use of limited contact hours, and to assist in grading. Let's talk to each other about what has worked and hasn't worked well in our online classes over the past year. Let's ask administrators for the time, and spare capacity, which means hiring more faculty, to invest in our course development.
Think of the stressful situations imposed on our students when some are driven to deny themselves the use of a toilet to answer a multiple choice question. Have we no humanity?
In response to
student concerns, the University of Illinois recently agreed to stop
using online proctoring after Summer 2021. Let's work with our colleagues to join them.
Here are some anecdotal quotes and resources compiled by a colleague of mine:
“Students argue that the testing systems have made them afraid to
click too much or rest their eyes for fear they’ll be branded as cheats.
Some students also said they’ve wept with stress or urinated at their
desks because they were forbidden from leaving
their screens.” And “At the software’s core, he said, “the most clear value conveyed to students is ‘We don’t trust you.’ ” in Cheating-detection companies made millions during the pandemic. Now students are fighting back.” The Washington Post, November 12, 2020,https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/12/test-monitoring-student-revolt/
“It’s become clear to me that algorithmic
proctoring is a modern surveillance technology that reinforces white
supremacy, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. The use of these tools
is an invasion of students’ privacy and, often, a civil rights
violation.”, Shea Swaugerin Software
that monitors students during tests perpetuates inequality and violates their privacy, MIT Technology Review, August 7, 2020
“Yes,
it's quite possible that students working at home in an online setting
could cheat on assignments in ways they may not in a face-to-face
setting. [...] There are two ways to respond: Being OK with this, or setting up a mini-surveillance state.
The first option is the simpler
of the two and so that's what you should go with. Trust students more,
and give them more grace and lenience, than you normally do – even more
than you are comfortable with. You might be surprised how they respond.” Robert
Talbert, Mastery Grading and Academic Honesty, July 20, 2020
“It’s in moments of crisis that you’re most likely
to sacrifice your civil rights,” she said. “But the problem is that once
you sacrifice them, it’s hard to get them back.” In The
Surveilled Student, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 15,
2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-surveilled-student
AU Mic b: A New Exoplanet in Orbit Around a Remarkable Nearby Star
By Dr Jonathan Gagné
I’m a research advisor at the Planétarium Rio Tinto Alcan of Espace pour la Vie, and I’ll keep you updated with some of our original research here. In this post, I will tell you about the recent
discovery of an exoplanet named AU Mic b. This discovery comes from a
long collaboration with Dr. Peter Plavchan, associate professor at George Mason University,
led since 2010. I joined Plavchan’s team in 2014, and helped them
analyze the data that led to the discovery of this new exoplanet.
An illustration of AU Mic b, a new Neptune-sized exoplanet. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith, USRA
The name of this exoplanet, AU Mic b, is the same as that of its host star AU Mic, except we added a small "b" next to it. This is how we name exoplanets in astrophysics, a convention endorsed by the International Astronomical Union, who are the authority on the naming of astrophysical bodies. This practice stems from binary stars nomenclature; for example, Alpha Centauri is a binary star, and we name its two stellar components Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B. We use capital letters for stars, and lowercase letters for exoplanets. If we discover a second planet around AU Mic, we'll name it AU Mic c, and so on—we reserve the letter A (capitalized) for the host star, but we usually keep it implicit rather than naming it AU Mic A.
An illustration of the star AU Mic and its debris disk. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith, USRA
Before we talk more about the exoplanet AU Mic b, I would like to tell you more about its parent star because it is a special one. Its name, AU Microscopii if we write it down in its entirety, comes from the Microscopium constellation where it can be found. We generally name the brightest star of a constellation with the Greek letter alpha (α Mic), the second one with beta (β Mic), and so on. However, the detailed rules are more complicated than this, especially for the fainter stars of a constellation. AU Mic is far from the brightest star in the Microscopium constellation, and that's why its name doesn't begin with a Greek letter. The Microscopium constellation is located in the Southern Hemisphere, but AU Mic can still be seen from Québec with a telescope, in late August and September evenings.
AU Mic is a young star, aged only about 24 million years, compared to our Sun's 4.6 billion years. We know AU Mic's age because it is part of the "β Pictoris moving group" a giant "stream" of stars that move together in space, and were born from the same molecular cloud. I talk more about these stellar groups in my first blog post—I spend a lot of my time studying them!
A
visualization of all known stars in the β Pictoris moving group,
compared with the position of the Sun, on which the green circles are
centered. The green circles have radii between 10 and 100 light years.
After approaching the regroupment of stars and moving around it, I
stopped the camera and turned on time to view where the stars are moving
towards in the upcoming few million years. AU Mic is part of this group
of stars, born together but not bound to each other gravitationally. A
higher-resolution version of this video is available here.
AU Mic is smaller than the Sun, with about 75% of its size, and half of its mass. We sometimes call such small stars red dwarfs, because they have a cooler temperature, and that gives them a redder color. They are also sometimes called M dwarfs or M stars in technical jargon, and they are popular stars for the search of exoplanets, for a few reasons.
First, they are very common. The physics inherent to the process of stellar formation causes about half of all stars to be born with masses smaller than half that of the Sun (i.e. M dwarfs). The fact that small stars are ubiquitous means that we can hope to find a larger number of exoplanets in total if we consider them in our searches.
Second, the fact that these stars are smaller, less massive, and dimmer makes them great for the detection of exoplanets. The transit method, whereby we wait for a planet to pass in front its star and make it dimmer, gets us a better sensitivity to small planets when the star is physically smaller. This is true because it is the ratio between the size of the planet and its parent star that dictates how much dimmer the star becomes during a transit event.
This transit method is represented in the video below, where we see the brightness changes caused by planets of different sizes. When we use this method to detect exoplanets, we don't actually see the surface of the star, because it is too far away from us: all that we see is a tiny point of light, which brightness goes down slightly during the transit.
Representation of an exoplanet transit. Larger planets, or smaller stars, will cause a more easily detected change in brightness. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
It is not always possible to detect exoplanets with the transit method, because their orbit needs to be aligned correctly for us to see the planets pass in front of their stars. The transit method also has benefits, however: it allows us to detect exoplanets at very far distances from us. This is why NASA's Kepler mission was so prolific in discovering exoplanets. The Kepler space telescope stared at one patch of the sky for more than 3 years and discovered over 2,300 exoplanets, more than half of all confirmed exoplanets !
A visualization of all exoplanet systems discovered by the Kepler space telescope, over time, and compared with the Solar System planets. Orbital periods and the sizes of exoplanet orbits are to scale, but the sizes of exoplanets are not displayed to scale, otherwise Earth-sized planets would be too small to see them. The exoplanet colors are representative of their expected temperatures, as indicated by the legend. As you can see above, Kepler identified many exoplanets in tight orbit around their star with short orbital periods. This is just because they are easier to find as they transit more often, and it does not mean that all exoplanets have orbits tighter than the Solar system on average. Credit: NASA, Ethan Kruse, music by Kevin MacLeodAnother method often used to detect exoplanets is called the radial velocity method. When an exoplanet orbits around its star, it pulls on the star and causes the star to wobble around a little bit. We can observe that from Earth with our instruments, because the Doppler effect causes the light to become just slightly bluer when the star moves towards us, and slightly redder when it moves away from us. This is analogous to the sound Doppler effect, causing a change of pitch in the sound of a car that moves towards or away from us.
The radial velocity method is what allowed us to discover the first
exoplanets around “normal” stars (some exoplanet candidates were found around pulsars a bit before that). Paul Butler,
my office neighbor and fellow coffee nerd during my first postdoc at
Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., is one of the
pioneers of the radial velocity method. He likes to recount how his team
used a device called an iodine gas cell at the telescope to
calibrate their instrument while searching for exoplanets back in the
1990s, and how they were wary that breaking the gas cell would be
extremely dangerous.
An illustration of the radial velocity method to detect exoplanets. Credit: NASA, “5 Ways to Find a Planet”
Once again, smaller stars are good for exoplanet detection with the radial velocity method. The intensity of the star's wobble, and therefore the color shift of its light, depends on the ratio between the mass of the planet and that of its star. Therefore, using the same instruments and telescope, we will be able to detect planets of a smaller mass around stars of a smaller mass.
There is, however, one problem that muddies the benefits of exoplanet detection around small stars: small stars are often "hyperactive", which means that they often flare, have lots of stellar spots, and magnetic storms that cause large and random flashes of visible light, UV and X-ray at their surface. This really complicates the detection of exoplanets, because these random events "pollute" the signal of potential exoplanets, and make our data a lot noisier.
The younger stars are even worse in this regard: for reasons we will not get into this time, young stars tend to rotate faster, and that causes them to have stronger magnetic fields. Magnetic fields are what drive stellar spots, mass ejections and violent storms at their surface, so younger stars with stronger magnetic fields will be even more active. AU Mic is one of the worst possible case scenarios in this regard: it is both small and young. Peter Plavchan likes to call it "Speedy Mic" for this reason, because it is a particularly unstable star that likes to flare a lot.
A visualization of what the star AU Mic A might look like with its large clusters of stellar spots and magnetic storms causing bright flashes in visible light, as well as UV and X-ray. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith, USRA
AU Mic is also really cool (and problematic) for yet another reason: it has a massive disk of debris around it. These debris are the result of planetary embryos, also called protoplanets, smashing into each other and getting blown to smithereens. This disk was discovered in 2005, and has been studied extensively since then. Researchers even found that clumps are moving away from the AU Mic at about 40,000 kilometers per hour in its debris disk! It is still unclear to this day what causes this.
Hubble and VLT images of the AU Mic disk. These images show the debris disk at distances up to about 60 astronomical units from the star (one astronomical unit is the Sun-Earth distance), and how its structure changes over time. Credits: NASA, ESA, ESO, and A. Boccaletti (Paris Observatory)
A study led by Cail Dailey using the Atacama Large Millimeter Array Observatory (ALMA) also looked at AU Mic's debris disk much closer in, and saw that some debris are being stirred, causing the disk to be thicker at separations from the star between 20 and 40 astronomical units. They think this is caused by either large planetary embryos, or a hidden exoplanet with less than about twice the mass of the Earth.
An image of the inner debris disk of AU Mic taken by ALMA. This image is zoomed in a lot more compared to the previous ones obtained with Hubble and VLT/SPHERE. Credit: Joint ALMA Observatory, ESO, AUI/NRAO, NAOJ, and Cail Daley (Van Vleck Observatory)
Now, this is a really cool star (in all senses of the word), but it is very hard to search for exoplanets around it because it is super active. We needed something to get past these problems of stellar activity if we hoped to open up the study of exoplanets around small stars in general with the radial velocity and transit methods. One strategy to do this is to stick with the radial velocity method, but look at the star's infrared light rather than its visible light. The signature of stellar activity does not impact infrared light as much as visible light, and the signature of an exoplanet is still apparent in the infrared. However, infrared detectors are a younger technology, making them a lot more expensive and less precise. It is also a lot harder to get a good calibration for these instruments, and this is required to precisely measure a star's color shift as it wobbles around.
This is where Peter Plavchan and his team come in: since about 2010, Peter started collaborating with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop such calibration devices. They built a device called a methane isotopologue gas cell, analogous to the iodine gas cell Paul Butler used, except that it is designed for infrared light (and it is also way less dangerous, thankfully). Peter's team also worked on developing a device even more precise, but way more expensive, called a near-infrared laser comb.
The methane gas cell we used at the Infrared Telescope Facility to calibrate our measurements. The gas cell itself is the transparent cylinder at the center of the photo; it is attached in front of our camera, and will therefore sit between the telescope and the camera. The light we receive from a star will pass through this transparent device, and get imprinted with the unique signature of the methane molecules contained in the gas cell, before making its way to the camera. These molecular fingerprints will serve as a calibration for our scientific measurements.
As soon as Peter got his hands on his methane isotopologue gas cell, he placed it on an instrument called CSHELL at the Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in Hawaii. He began observing some stars near the Earth with his team, focusing on those which exoplanets were inaccessible to visible-light instruments: small stars, and in particular young ones. As you can imagine, AU Mic was one of the first stars they pointed the telescope at, back in 2010.
The IRTF telescope, on the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii. The observatory literally sits above the clouds. Credit: NASA, JPL
It's only in 2014 that I joined Peter Plavchan's efforts in this project. I was 4 years into my Ph.D., working on the detection of brown dwarfs in young groups of stars, like the β Pictoris moving group with René Doyon and David Lafrenière at Université de Montréal. I applied to an online contest for a 6-months scientific exchange with researchers at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at Caltech, and to my delight, I obtained an assignment with Peter Plavchan to work on the detection of exoplanets. So I moved to Pasadena, and excitingly started working with Peter and his team during that next summer. As part of this project, I went to IRTF a few times and observed many stars, AU Mic part of those, with CSHELL and Peter's methane isotopologue gas cell.
Apart from helping with the telescope observing, I spent much of my time in Pasadena writing computer codes to transform the raw data the CSHELL camera gave us into measurements we can use and interpret. This may sound surprising when you are used to taking pictures with a commercial camera, but images that come out from scientific cameras require a lot of work before we can hope to obtain a final product. In this particular case, the final product we obtain for every star, and every night spent at the telescope, is a single measurement of how fast the star is moving towards us, or away from us (this is what a radial velocity measurement is). Pasadena is also where I discovered Copa Vida's single-origin espresso shots, which began a whole other journey for me!
Peter Plavchan and I, staring at the Sun with the Keck telescopes in the background. This is the view we had when arriving at the IRTF telescope, located behind the camera. Photos by myself and Peter Plavchan
When I came back to Montreal after this delightful experience in Pasadena, the work was far from being done—research projects like this one routinely require decades of work, especially when new instrument technologies are involved. I kept my collaboration going with Peter Plavchan, and continued analyzing CSHELL data, and observing remotely with CSHELL, as one of my several ongoing projects. In 2016, I led the writing of a scientific paper that described our first results with this project. Our instruments were not yet precise enough to detect AU Mic b, but we ruled out the presence of a planet more massive than Jupiter in tight orbit around AU Mic. Peter Gao, also part of Peter Plavchan's team during my stay in Pasadena and now a close friend, led another scientific paper in 2016 where he described the algorithm he built to take in my calibrated CSHELL data, and transform it into a radial velocity measurement (yes, this science is so complicated that it required two computer codes, mine and Peter Gao's).
Shoveling snow was part of the job as we got caught in a snowstorm during one of our 2017 observing runs at the IRTF telescope (seen here in the photo). Photo by Peter Plavchan
By the time we published both our 2016 papers, a new and improved infrared camera came up at IRTF. This one, called iSHELL, is similar to CSHELL in what it does, except it is so much better, and in particular more precise. We immediately started using it, and soon after the team started gathering enough data, I flew to Missouri state where Peter Plavchan was now a faculty member at Missouri State University. We sat down with his new student Bryson Cale, and spent the week developing new computer codes for the iSHELL camera in a hack-a-thon style week. They both later came back to visit me in Washington, D.C. during my first postdoc, where we worked more on the computer codes.
Once we started gathering iSHELL data, it did not take long before Peter Plavchan noticed something weird about AU Mic. He emailed us in fall 2016 to tell us that he thought there might well be first signs of an exoplanet hiding in our data. However, this would have been a dangerous claim to make publicly, especially given that we were venturing in an unexplored territory with applying the infrared radial velocity method to an exceptionally active star. We needed to be absolutely certain that what we were seeing was an exoplanet, so we needed to keep observing it as often as possible.
A view of the IRTF telescope's primary mirror from inside the dome. Photo by Peter Plavchan
As we gathered more data, the signal became gradually clearer that there was an exoplanet similar to Neptune around AU Mic. But then, NASA launched the TESS space telescope, and it too observed AU Mic! The TESS mission stared at many stars close to the Sun, hoping to detect exoplanet transit events, like those that we described earlier. As is often the case with NASA missions, TESS data is available to everyone soon after it is observed, and it becomes a gold mine for any researcher to dig in. Obviously, Peter started looking for our new candidate exoplanet AU Mic b in the data that TESS gathered for the star AU Mic, and he found exactly what he was looking for: two transit events seemingly caused by a Neptune-sized exoplanet!
The transit signal also indicated that AU Mic b orbits its star every 8.5 days. This is an extremely short orbital period! Imagine if the Earth orbited around the Sun that fast: our year would only last 8.5 days. AU Mic b orbits so fast because it is very close to its star, at 0.07 astronomical units, only 7% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The radial velocity data we have in hand also indicates that the mass of AU Mic b is smaller than 3.4 times that of Neptune, and TESS data indicates that its size is almost exactly the same as Neptune. Interestingly, TESS data also shows hints of a possible second planet, at 0.13 astronomical units from the star (almost twice as far from its star as AU Mic b), and twice the size of the Earth. However, we will need more data to be sure, especially when working with a star as noisy and unstable as AU Mic.
This is a really cool discovery, not only because it opens the door to more research for exoplanets around young and small stars. The fact that AU Mic is so young means that we are catching the exoplanet AU Mic b in the first moments after it formed. Some researchers think it may have formed a bit further from its star, at about 10 astronomical units, and then migrated inwards. If that is true, it means that it must have migrated fast, because it already landed as its current location when the star is still only about 24 million years old.
A video based on a computer simulation, showing
how a planet may form inside the disk of a star, causing spiral waves in
the disk, and later migrate inwards closer to the star. Credit:
Ximena S. Ramos and Pablo Benítez-Llambay
This discovery also gives us a complete picture of what a debris disk looks like in a system that just completed forming an exoplanet like AU Mic b. We know that exoplanets form inside disks around young stars, so we can now look at AU Mic's disk and wonder what imprints AU Mic b might have left on the disk. We can also hope to observe soon exactly how the intense UV and X-ray radiation of AU Mic, as well as its stellar wind, are affecting the atmosphere of AU Mic b. We think that these phenomena could cause the atmosphere to be eroded away. This is an important question because it will determine how hostile to life stellar activity may be for rocky exoplanets around small stars (we think AU Mic b is made of gas, like Neptune).
Another reason why this discovery is so cool is that AU Mic is really not that far from us: it is only 32 light years away, what we can safely call our galactic backyard. It is indeed one of the closest stars to us in the whole β Pictoris moving group, as can be seen below:
A visualization of all known stars in the β Pictoris moving group, compared with the position of the Sun, on which the green circles are centered. The green circles have radii between 10 and 100 light years. The camera moves around the β Pictoris moving group, and then I gradually increase the brightness of AU Mic to show where it is located: it is one of the β Pictoris moving group stars nearest to us. A higher-resolution version of this video is available here.
This system is so close to us that AU Mic b is one of the closest exoplanets we currently know! In fact, only 37 of the currently confirmed 4,171 planetary systems compiled on the NASA exoplanet archive are closer to us than AU Mic. But yet again, an image is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a thousand images:
A visualization of the AU Mic system location compared with the position of the Sun, on which the green circles are centered. The green circles have radii between 10 and 100 light years. After a few seconds I turn on the locations of all 2,979 currently known and confirmed exoplanet systems for which we know the precise distance from the Sun (required to determine their 3D position). Notice how some of the exoplanet systems form square patterns in the sky when the camera is close to the Sun, at the seventh second of the video near the center of the frame: those are the shapes of the Kepler detectors, back when it always stared in the same direction during its main mission. When we move away from the Sun, we can better see how known exoplanets are located either relatively close to the Sun, or in the direction where Kepler stared. A higher-resolution version of this video is available here.
Peter started the long process of writing up and submitting a scientific paper to the journal Nature, which was finally published this June 24th. This discovery caused quite the media sensation, and even trended on CNN!
Now the science does not end here: Peter got busy teaming up with scientists around the world before publishing his Nature paper, to begin further investigations of this new planetary system. This led to five(!) additional scientific papers, all timed to also become public on June 24th. Four of these teams measured the obliquity of AU Mic b—the tilt between its rotation axis and the axis of its orbital motion, see this video for more explanations—and they all found that the planet's spin axis is aligned with its orbital axis. This is evidence that it indeed formed from AU Mic's protoplanetary disk, and likely did not suffer a cataclysmic collision with other planetary embryos.
There are still many unknowns about how planets form, so discovering young systems like AU Mic b is important to challenge our expectations and refine our understanding of this process. Each one of these discoveries provides us with a "photography" of what a given system may look like at a given age. Remember that one million years is very short at the astrophysical scale, so we cannot wait to see how AU Mic b will evolve, and we need to instead find another similar but slightly older system if we hope to constrain exactly what will happen next in the life of AU Mic b.
One of the five teams mentioned above, featuring other members of the Institute for Research on Exoplanets at Université de Montréal here in Québec, also measured the strength of the magnetic field of the star AU Mic, and how it varies with time. They used this to better understand how the star's activity affected the radial velocity measurements.
Another scientific team tried to measure the atmospheric composition of AU Mic b with a method called transit spectroscopy, but the star was so active that it prevented them from being able to measure a useful signal. NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will probably be able to do this successfully.
Finally, another one of the scientific teams built computer simulations to better understand how AU Mic's stellar wind may affect the atmosphere of its exoplanet. They found that stronger winds will tend to compress the planet's atmosphere, and make it harder to measure its composition with our instruments. They also made predictions about what the transit would look like at a specific wavelength of light (i.e. a color of light). Measuring AU Mic b's planetary transit with an instrument designed to see this specific color only will shed more light on how strong the stellar winds of AU Mic are, and whether AU Mic b's atmosphere is getting eroded or not by the star's violent UV and X-ray emissions.
NASA got so excited about this discovery that, on top of all the nice visualizations they made for AU Mic and its planet, they also created this awesome poster:
A promotional poster of the exoplanet AU Mic b. Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech
I'm super proud to have helped Peter and his team with this discovery, but I also want to emphasize how this is the result of such a long haul, sustained commitment on his part. Peter not only put together the technology to do this and taught several students how to use it along the way (including myself back in 2014), he also led the decades-long observations of AU Mic, and jumped through many hoops to publish this discovery, across many moves, position changes, and obviously, a world pandemic. I sure hope he will line his walls with that poster!
