European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: eso2105 — Science Release

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of a black hole, has today revealed a new view of the massive object at the centre of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy: how it looks in polarised light. This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarisation, a signature of magnetic fields, this close to the edge of a black hole. The observations are key to explaining how the M87 galaxy, located 55 million light-years away, is able to launch energetic jets from its core. (learn more)

The EAAE-ESO "Catch a Star 2020" contest results can now be found at

https://www.eaae-astronomy.org/catch-a-star/cas-winners/cas-winners-2020

"Catch a Star" is the only astronomy contest for young people that has been continuously organized in the last years in Europe. ESO and EAAE have kept the contest going on despite the pandemic and schools from all Europe show that teachers and students are able to produce quality works even under this dificult working conditions.

EAAE and ESO want to publicly recognise the high level of the many dozens of projects presented this under severe conditions and congratulate all the winners for the wonderful works they presented.

As we announced on July 1st, the this year's edition of "Catch a Star" is now open and School students around the world are invited to take part in the 2020 Catch a Star astronomy writing contest.

To participate, students should submit a written report on an astronomical topic of their choice — for example, an astronomical object, phenomenon, observation, scientific problem or theory. Reports must be written in English and be no more than 5000 words in length. They may be undertaken by groups of up to three students, plus a group leader who is not a student.

Each submission must be emailed as a PDF file to astro.edu@gmail.com. The deadline for all entries is 23 December 2020.

The five winners will each receive a mounted image of a fascinating astronomical object, courtesy of ESO. In addition, winner teams will also have the chance to hold a video conference with a professional astronomer.

Catch a Star is organised jointly by the European Association for Astronomy Education (EAAE) and ESO. Its aim is to encourage creativity and independent work amongst students, and to strengthen and expand their astronomical knowledge and skills.

Find out more about the competition on the Catch a Star website.

Links

• Catch a Star 2020

This ethereal remnant of a long dead star, nestled in the belly of The Whale, bears an uneasy resemblance to a skull floating through space. Captured in astounding detail by ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the eerie Skull Nebula is showcased in this new image in beautiful bloodshot colours. This planetary nebula is the first known to be associated with a pair of closely bound stars orbited by a third outer star. (read more)

School students around the world are invited to take part in the 2020 Catch a Star astronomy writing contest.

To participate, students should submit a written report on an astronomical topic of their choice — for example, an astronomical object, phenomenon, observation, scientific problem or theory. Reports must be written in English and be no more than 5000 words in length. They may be undertaken by groups of up to three students, plus a group leader who is not a student.

Each submission must be emailed as a PDF file to astro.edu@gmail.com. The deadline for all entries is 23 December 2020.

The five winners will each receive a mounted image of a fascinating astronomical object, courtesy of ESO. In addition, winner teams will also have the chance to hold a video conference with a professional astronomer.

Catch a Star is organised jointly by the European Association for Astronomy Education (EAAE) and ESO. Its aim is to encourage creativity and independent work amongst students, and to strengthen and expand their astronomical knowledge and skills.

Find out more about the competition on the Catch a Star website.

Links

• Catch a Star 2020

Source: heic2011 — Photo Release

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope demonstrates its full range of imaging capabilities with two new images of planetary nebulae. The images depict two nearby young planetary nebulae, NGC 6302, dubbed the Butterfly Nebula, and NGC 7027. Both are among the dustiest planetary nebulae known and both contain unusually large masses of gas, which made them an interesting pair for study in parallel by a team of researchers. (learn more)

Source : ESA

Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May has teamed up with asteroid researchers to investigate striking similarities and a puzzling difference between separate bodies explored by space probes. The research team ran a supercomputer-based ‘fight club’ involving simulated large asteroid collisions to probe the objects’ likely origins. Their work is reported in Nature Communications.  

Source: eso2009 — Science Release

Astronomers using European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes have discovered giant spots on the surface of extremely hot stars hidden in stellar clusters. Not only are these stars plagued by magnetic spots, some also experience superflare events, explosions of energy several million times more energetic than similar eruptions on the Sun. The findings, published today in Nature Astronomy, help astronomers better understand these puzzling stars and open doors to resolving other elusive mysteries of stellar astronomy.

School students around the world are invited to take part in the 2019 Catch a Star astronomy writing contest.

To participate, students should submit a written report on an astronomical topic of their choice — for example, an astronomical object, phenomenon, observation, scientific problem or theory. Reports must be written in English and be no more than 5000 words in length. They may be undertaken by groups of up to three students, plus a group leader who is not a student.

Each submission must be emailed as a PDF file to astro.edu@gmail.com. The deadline for all entries is 30 December 2019.

The five winners will each receive a mounted image of a fascinating astronomical object, courtesy of ESO. In addition, winner teams will also have the chance to hold a video conference with a professional astronomer.

Catch a Star is organised jointly by the European Association for Astronomy Education (EAAE) and ESO. Its aim is to encourage creativity and independent work amongst students, and to strengthen and expand their astronomical knowledge and skills.

Find out more about the competition on the Catch a Star website.

Links

• Catch a Star 2019

At a time when some delusional people, some with major responsabilities, continue to deny human major role on climate changes, Europe peaks to temperatures never known before since the beginning of temperature records. Learn more about this situation at ESA.

Video credits: Channel 4 News

Mankind celebrates the 50th aniversary of the first landing of men on the Moon. On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins concluded an adventure that had started seven years earlier when John Fitzgerald Kennedy stated at Rice University "We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too."

Neil Armstrongs last sentence before he stepped down on lunar soil are as valid today as they were 50 years ago: "It's a small step for a man, but a giant leap for mankind".

School students from around the world are invited to take part in the 2018 Catch a Star contest. This is a European astronomical writing contest, with some prizes that will leave students starry-eyed!

To participate, students should submit a written report on an astronomical topic of their own choice — for example, an astronomical object, phenomenon, observation, scientific problem or theory. Reports must be written in English and be no more than 5000 words in length. Contestants may work in groups of up to three students, plus a group leader who is not a student.

The idea of the Catch a Star program is to encourage students to work together, to learn about astronomy and discover things for themselves by researching information on an astronomical object.

Each submission must be emailed as a PDF file to astro.edu@gmail.com. The deadline for all entries is 17:00 CET on December 14th, 2018.

There will be five lucky winners chosen in the Main Category that will have prizes like mounted pictures, video conference with a professional astronomer, and more.

Also a Special category has been created for students up to 15 years old. This category will also have Winner and Runner-Up prizes each of which will receive prizes like the main category.

The goal of the European Astronomy Contest Catch a Star is to stimulate the creativity and independent work of students from European secondary schools, to strengthen and expand their astronomical knowledge and skills, and to help the spread of information technologies in the educational process.

Catch a Star is a contest that has been held as a result of the collaboration between the European Association for Astronomy Education (EAAE) and European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Source: ESA

The Characterising Exoplanet Satellite, Cheops, will target 15 October to 14 November 2019 for launch.

Cheops will lift off on a Soyuz rocket operated by Arianespace from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, sharing the ride into space with a satellite that is part of the Italian Cosmo-SkyMed constellation. The two satellites will separate in turn into their own orbits soon after ascent, with Cheops operating in a low-Earth orbit at an altitude of 700 km.

The satellite will observe individual bright stars that are known to host exoplanets, in particular those in the Earth-to-Neptune size range. By targeting known planets, Cheops will know exactly when and where to point to catch the exoplanet as it transits across the disk of its host star. Its ability to observe multiple transits of each planet will enable scientists to achieve the high-precision transit signatures that are needed to measure the sizes of small planets. (learn more)

Source: ESA

Based on a new theoretical model, a team of scientists explored the rich data archive of ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra space observatories to find pulsating X-ray emission from three sources. The discovery, relying on previous gamma-ray observations of the pulsars, provides a novel tool to investigate the mysterious mechanisms of pulsar emission, which will be important to understand these fascinating objects and use them for space navigation in the future.

School students from around the world are invited to take part in the 2017 Catch a Star contest. This is a European astronomical writing contest. To participate, students should submit a written report on an astronomical topic of their own choice — for example, an astronomical object, phenomenon, observation, scientific problem or theory. Reports must be written in English and be no more than 5000 words in length. Contestants may work in groups of up to three students, plus a group leader who is not a student.

Send your work now. The complete project must be received by December 20, 2017.

Detailed information – including a media kit and detailed instructions on how to submit an entry online – is available at http://www.eaae-astronomy.org/catchastar/.

The winners of this year’s Catch a Star Contest have been announced.

The top three prizes were awarded to: The Lost Planet, by Andrea Moral Suárez, Natalia Serrano López and Ana Sánchez Díez from Spain; Life on Mars, by Daniel Vilda Rodríguez, Daniel Sayad Pérez Peréz and Iván Rodríguez Lozano from Spain; and Dark Matter in the Classroom by Simona Stoyanova and Ognyan Simeonov from Bulgaria.

A complete list of the winners can be found on the Catch a Star website.

ESO is presenting a mounted astronomical image to each of the top five places and each winning team will also have the chance either to carry out remote observations at the National Astronomical Observatory “Rozhen”, Bulgaria, or to hold a video conference with a professional astronomer.

Secondary school students from around the world were invited to take part in the contest. To participate students had to submit a written report on an astronomical topic of their choice — for example an astronomical object, phenomenon, observation, scientific problem or theory.

Catch a Star is a contest organised as a collaboration between the European Association for Astronomy Education (EAAE) and ESO that has been running since 2002. Its goal is to stimulate the creativity and independent work of students, and to strengthen and expand their astronomical knowledge and skills. The programme encourages students to work together, to learn about astronomy and to discover things for themselves by researching information on an astronomical object.

Find out more about the competition on the Catch a Star website.

Links

• Catch a Star Website
• Rozhen National Astronomical Observatory
• ESO -European Southern Observatory

 Carlota FERNANDES, Diogo GONCALVES and Nelson REBELO, the winners of the 2016 edition of the Odysseus II competition in the Pioneers category, accompanied by their teacher Cristina PINHO of the Sebastião e Silva Secondary School will be in the Pavilion of Knowledge (Lisbon, Portugal) in the first initiative of the Movement Portugal Code will take place in the on December 11, 2016. This presence will serve to give visibility to this amazing project. To know more about the event click here (in Portuguese).

Source: ESO Science Release eso1641

The polarisation of light emitted by a neutron star.
Image credit: ESO/L. Calçada

By studying the light emitted from an extraordinarily dense and strongly magnetised neutron star using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers may have found the first observational indications of a strange quantum effect, first predicted in the 1930s. The polarisation of the observed light suggests that the empty space around the neutron star is subject to a quantum effect known as vacuum birefringence.(read more)

Due to the requests of teachers all around Europe, the deadline for the submission of Catch a Star's works has been postponed to December 20th, 2016.

Teachers say that they have done the work with their students but in many cases have not been able to finish the translation of their work to English.

Since December 16th is the end of first term in many European countries EAAE has decided to extend the contest submissions deadline until December 20th. This will give students an opportunity to finish their works. It will also be an opportunity for more teachers to apply with works of their students.

Winners of the 2015-2016 Odysseus space science contest have travelled to French Guiana to observe the successful launch of an Ariane 5 rocket. The trip is just part of their reward for earning top honours at the Odysseus international finals in July. Equally exciting opportunities await young Europeans in the 2016-2017 contest cycle.

Witnessing a rocket launch at the spaceport in French Guiana was an extraordinary experience for the Odysseus prizewinners. “It was amazing just to watch the transfer of the rocket to the launch pad”, says Alice Antonelli from Italy. She won first place in the Explorers category of competition for university undergraduates. For Nelson Rebelo the trip was nothing less than “a dream come true”. Nelson was part of the three-member team of high-school students from Portugal who submitted the most convincing project in the Pioneers category. Next year too, first-prize winners in both categories can look forward to visiting Europe’s spaceport in South America and to earning coveted internships in the space sector.