1/3/2024 0 Comments Stars aline![]() ![]() ![]() Although this gives rise to conflict among the boys, Maki challenges and pushes his fellow team members to not only keep up with his seemingly natural talent, but also drive them to devote themselves to the game they once neglected. Toma refuses to back down and ends up persuading Maki – only under the condition that Toma will pay him for his participation and cover other club expenses.Īs Maki joins the team, his incredible endurance and quick learning allow him to immediately outperform the rest of the team. With hope in one hand and a racket in the other, he recruits the help of the reluctant Maki Katsuragi, a new transfer student who demonstrates natural talent when he catches a stray cat in his classroom. “The mass of a star is absolutely fundamental for understanding the physics that we observe.Toma Shinjo, the president of Shijo Minami Boys Soft Tennis Club, finds the club in danger of being shut down due to their poor skills and lack of positive results in matches. “Stars, in a sense, act as distant laboratories where scientists can observe physics under extreme conditions that cannot be replicated on Earth,” he said. Beyond the study of exoplanets, Nielsen explained that this work can have an impact on pure physics. By measuring the precise mass of a star, these observations may even help them identify and gain an understanding of planets that are orbiting distant stars, whether they are “habitable worlds, or Jupiter-sized planets,” Nielsen said. Moving forward, Nielsen noted that he and Bramich are collaborating with researchers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore to carry out follow up observations of some of the predicted microlensing events using the Hubble Space Telescope. “Without the support of the High Performance Computing group, we would have been quite a bit slower" analyzing the data, Bramich said. The rapid succession of three research papers that used the information provided by Gaia is a testament to Bramich and Nielsen’s approach to data analysis and their ability to predict a huge amount of microlensing events: they foretold 2,601 occurrences that will happen this century, while other groups that were using the same information predicted only a handful.įor the data analysis, the researchers looked to the High Performance Computing group at NYUAD and their supercomputer, Dalma. Hundreds of scientists were waiting for the data to be released, as Gaia has prompted a "massive paradigm shift in the quality and quantity of data and how far we can look in our own galaxy" since the spacecraft has been launched, Bramich said. To make their predictions, Bramich and Nielsen crunched data provided by Gaia, a space observatory that analyzes the three-dimensional position and motion of stars in the Milky Way. Watch: NYU Abu Dhabi research responds to vital local and global challenges.And once they happen, they are gone forever, which makes Bramich and Nielsen's almanac particularly valuable for astronomers. This ephemeral nature means that preparation and timing are critical if astronomers hope to observe them. Microlensing happens quickly relative to the cosmic time scale, lasting for hours or days. One paper has already been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics two are forthcoming in Acta Astronomica. These predictions will allow researchers to focus their instruments on precise locations at the correct times to gain a deeper understanding of thousands of objects in the sky. What’s more, this technique also allows researchers to study objects - such as planets - that emit little or no light of their own.īramich and his colleague Martin Nielsen, postdoctoral associate at NYUAD's Center for Space Science, have recently authored papers that predict more than 2,600 instances of microlensing that will occur by the end of this century. But a particular class of gravitational lensing, called microlensing due to the relatively low mass of the lens object and the subtle effect it has on the source, allows astronomers to make “precise mass measurements” of lone stars that wouldn’t be possible using other methods, said Daniel Bramich, research associate in the physics program at NYU Abu Dhabi. Typically, the mass of a distant star can only be determined if it is in orbit with another star - this is called a binary system. ![]() The effect was predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity, but it wasn't until the late 20th century that images of gravitational lensing were captured by astronomers.īeyond serving as evidence for Einstein’s theory, gravitational lensing is useful for several reasons. Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon where light from a distant source, such as a star or galaxy, is bent around a massive object sitting between the light source and Earth. ![]()
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