Why is an astronomer important

Mapping every aspect of the planet and updating new roads, road closures and even traffic jams — we have satellites to thank for all these amazing abilities. Back before the advent of GPS technology, many sailors relied on the stars to navigate at night. This technique, known as celestial navigation, uses the science of position fixing to navigate. Astronomy influenced this navigation with the advent of the sextant. A sextant is telescope that sailors used to look at the stars while navigating.

It measured the angular distance above the horizon. By knowing this, sailors were able to calculate their positions at night and travel by day based on the position of the sun. It was intended to reduce impact in the event of a crash, specifically a space shuttle crash. Tracking weather patterns and storms is important, especially in places where different seasons bring severe weather. Monsoons, droughts, wildfires, tornadoes and hurricanes can all be life-threatening, and will probably become more common due to climate change.

But even without the extreme storms, we still use satellites to track day-to-day weather patterns. During the early days of camcorders, NASA needed to enhance the video footage from nighttime recordings. Since its creation, this technology has gone on to help the FBI analyze footage and help the military during reconnaissance missions.

EMI, or electromagnetic interference, is something both parties need to take into account. EMI has the ability to disrupt electrical circuits and cause malfunctions of satellites and aircraft alike. When going into the atmosphere, or sending rockets into space, all variable must be considered. From the earliest days of civilization, astronomy has had an outsized impact on our culture.

Ancient humans gave names to the constellations and tracked them so they knew when to plant their crops. Astrologers kept a careful watch on the sky for any change that might foretell doom.

And to the average person, the heavens served as a storybook, recording favorite legends like the blockbuster films of the day. Wi-fi was invented by an astronomer trying to sharpen images from his telescope. Here are four surprising ways astronomers have reshaped our modern world. For more than two decades, an astronomical observatory shaped like a 1,foot Y has sprawled across Anderson Mesa in northern Arizona. This instrument, owned by the military and run by astronomers at both the U.

Naval Observatory and Lowell Observatory, is the biggest telescope of its kind. The Navy Precision Optical Interferometer uses an array of telescopes to catalog the exact locations of stars and track their minute movements with incredible accuracy.

GPS satellites and other spacecraft depend on these star charts to plot their course through the cosmos. Equipment used by NASA, the Department of Defense and all manner of other modern tech would be lost, as would your cellphone — and, quite likely, you. No other classical science — medicine, botany, natural history, animal studies, etc — had such a foundation, as they were based on visual taxonomy alone.

Medicine had its four-humour pathology, but therapeutics were still rooted in rule of thumb. And it stayed there to the 19th century. By , Adams and LeVerrier could both calculate the position of Neptune, yet no-one had any realistic idea regarding what caused cholera or typhus! Chemistry was the first to develop a verifiable mathematical basis after Lavoisier, Dalton, Berthollet, Mendeleev, etc over the period — brought forth the ideas of atomic weights and the Periodic Table.

Medicine began to develop a foundation with Virchow's Cellular Pathology , Pasteur and Koch working on bacteria — and developed rapidly thereafter in tandem with organic chemistry.

But not until Crick and Watson's geometry of the double helix of DNA in the s did the biomedical sciences develop a comparable mathematical foundation. The issue of economic impact looms very large in British scientific life at the moment and it has generated a lot of tension. They are increasing their emphasis on knowledge transfer and the economic impact of their work.

They must increase that emphasis further without sacrificing the research emphasis for which we are rightly admired. Over the past couple of years we have managed to include societal and cultural impact as well as economic impact in these measures, but these are terribly difficult to quantify.

What the government is really talking about is economic impact because this is something they think they can measure. Some councils have begun favouring government initiatives over investigator-motivated projects and at one in particular, the Science and Technology Research Council, deep cuts have been made to fundamental fields in part to protect more commercially appealing programmes … The one council where subtlety is most lacking and where the Treasury's influence may be most damaging is the STFC which oversees large facilities for physics and astronomy.

We were bunged together to form the STFC: a research council that was not properly funded to start with, then received a disastrously low amount of money in the Comprehensive Spending Review in We've never recovered the previous funding level because soon afterwards the UK and much of the world slipped into recession.

Shortly after the CSR announcement, the Chief Executive of STFC Keith Mason told researchers working in the more fundamental fields — that is, astronomy — that they needed to work harder to prove their economic worth. An emphasis on economic impact matters to the average astronomer in the university research community because, when we are told that the money is going to be focused on areas that are going to be of most benefit to the UK economy, we struggle to explain how our work is going to change, say, the price of bananas.

In part this is because our work seems distant from most people's everyday life. Even if we talk about something major, like an exploding star or a continental rift, it happens far away. If it took place in London, maybe people would listen.

It is frequently stated that the emphasis on economic impact is not meant to detract from basic research. There's a tension in all this that is difficult to resolve. It's not a uniformly gloomy picture. One area where it is possible that things are going to be okay, even in the UK, is the space sector.

Even better, it turns out that the space sector has been completely unaffected by the recession. That's good news for space science, although quite how space research fits into that booming economy is not so obvious. But the potential for growth in UK space industries is clear, especially when looking at government spending on space in European countries and the US budgets. France has an enormous space programme, Germany also has a large one, Italy has quite a large budget — and the UK is lying next to Belgium, at the low end of the scale.

This is an area where there is certainly large potential for expansion in the UK. But there's another league table that is rather more worrying. This is a measure of national research success, shown in table 1, using data from May from the company ISI Thompson. The table shows countries ranked according to citations per paper, including the number of refereed research papers in space sciences including astronomy per country, together with the citations to those papers, aggregated over 10 years.

An unfortunate thing about an American company like ISI Thompson is that they're not especially sensitive to the rest of the world and treat Wales, England and Scotland as separate countries — but that's good for Scotland, as they come top in terms of citations per paper! If you look at the list superficially, it gives a poor impression of us, especially as it came out initially ranked in terms of numbers of papers, with the USA first.

But if you look at the figures in terms of the number of citations, the US is still at number one, with Germany second, and England at number three. If you add together England, Wales and Scotland Northern Ireland was not included , we sit in second place, ahead of Germany.

This means we are really number two in the world in space science, which here includes astronomy. Unfortunately, with the cuts that are happening now, with the grants line cut by more than a third, and so on, I cannot imagine that a comparable table for this decade, in or even in , will still have the UK as number two. We are being left behind by our scientific rivals, because Germany, France, Canada and others are putting a lot of money into their basic science.

It is the UK that has chosen to leave basic science by the wayside. I also want to cover the issue of spin-offs. Does astronomy have spin-offs that one can talk about in terms of economic benefits? The answer is yes. Take CCDs. Astronomers did not discover CCDs: they were discovered serendipitously by people designing memory storage devices. They wanted to store electrons in each pixel, as we would put it, and the charge coupling was a way of shunting them around quickly in order to read the memory.

What they found was that these devices worked rather differently depending on whether you had the light on or not: they had produced very sensitive light detectors. The early devices would have been useless in a camera, because they had all sorts of faults and quirks, but it was astronomers who spotted their potential and developed them. Now they are widely used, in the sense that almost everyone has a CCD in their phone.

But astronomy tends not to get the credit for that development work. And then there's wi-fi. An Australian astronomer, John O'Sullivan, who received the Australia Prize last year, discovered the methods we use to access wireless computer networks as part of his work as a radio astronomer, and the patent on this arose from his work.

Active optics technology and ultra-sensitive detectors over the whole electromagnetic spectrum are two more areas where astronomy has led the development of more widely applicable techniques.

Some of the most sensitive detectors come from astronomy because, to paraphrase Craig Mackay, astronomers usually can't do anything about the brightness of their source, so if they want to make the best images, they can't do what you would do in the lab — simply turn up the brightness of the source. The only way to improve the image is to improve the efficiency and properties of the detectors, or change the size of the telescope.

Well, we push the size of telescopes as much as possible, but having got a telescope, you then have to go and push the detector. That's why, in terms of detectors, astronomy leads the world. I could go on and on. There's a lot of radio signalling and radio communication technology that owes its background to astronomy, there are companies working on statistical inference, using techniques derived from astronomy, through data handling, image processing, etc.

But very often you find that the astronomers never went into that field in order to make the economic impact. And if you had told them to do so in the first place, they probably wouldn't have done it. It's not why or how we do what we do. You can do this analysis for your own subject area, any field in astronomy or any other basic science.

He was working at the company American Science and Engineering at the time. A lot of this successful spin-off came from the enormous synergy between X-ray astronomy and the techniques needed to develop these machines, to get the very best way to detect X-rays. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory carries not only very fine telescopes but also an impressive set of gratings.

Its high-energy transmission grating based on gold nanostructures was designed by Claude Canizares and Mark Schattenberg, and it produces very fine X-ray spectra.

What these guys did in the s and s was to work out how to build very regular replicated structures that were able to diffract X-rays. Chandra's wonderful spectra eventually came out of that work. The spin-off from this is that Schattenberg now has his own company, as well as being a research astrophysicist at MIT.

Their products are used in laser fusion, for example, and there are a variety of other applications that you can see on their website.

There are all sorts of examples of spin-offs from our science. The University of Leicester also takes X-ray detection seriously and makes lots of detectors, among them large-area high-resolution detectors with high efficiency and low background.

Dental X-ray imaging is connected with the techniques developed for astronomy — they don't use exactly the same techniques, but there's a synergy there, and this is one area developed by e2v. Medical imaging generally has a lot in common with astronomical imagery — apart from the scale.

In general you don't want to make the X-ray source so intense that the sample is damaged figure 4. The MPE team at Leicester also helped to build the high-resolution camera for Chandra and a spin-off from that which is used in the medical centre at Nottingham.

They also make mini gamma-ray cameras. The team at Munich that was working on XMM-Newton, producing the pn detector, got another spin-off: out of designing and making that detector, they now have a company called PN Sensor which makes radiation sensors for a wide variety of applications. A 10 19 difference in scale. Top : 27keV X-ray emission from a I-labelled mouse tumour approximately 1mm across, in the lab. Institute of Cancer Research Bottom : 0.

University of Leicester. I'm pulling out these examples just to emphasize how common this is. If you go to any branch of astronomy, you will find there are many such examples. It's not why we do the astronomy in the first place, it's a spin-off, and although the benefits of this technology are clear to see, the cost of the work contributing to its development would be extremely difficult to determine.

And then of course we have direct applications of a lot of solar—terrestrial physics research figure 5. In the next few years as the Sun ramps up in its cycle, solar activity could cause problems for satellite navigation and other technologies as we move towards solar maximum. There's a direct connection there between astronomy in the solar—terrestrial connection and things that will happen in people's own homes and lives.

As we move away from solar minimum, flares and coronal mass ejections will become more frequent and powerful, putting at risk our satellite-based technology such as satnavs. I also want to emphasize one enormous impact that astronomy has — and here's today's Metro newspaper to highlight it. It's got a big picture of Saturn on one page, and a few pages further on there's a whole section about astronomy. There are very few sciences which are treated so well by the press as astronomy and that's because the public interest in astronomy and its role in society and in culture is one of our major impacts.

But I have no idea how you quantify that impact. How do you put a number on a child reading today's Metro and being inspired to study science? Developing this instrument led to a host of other detectors, and the nanoruler for making the largest high-precision gratings, such as this 91 — 42 cm grating made for laser pulse compression at Osaka University above. The RAS has tried to consider economic impact seriously and we combined with the Institute of Physics to see if we could measure it.

We wanted to connect a decision to put a pound into astronomy research with the pounds that later appear elsewhere as a result. We planned 12 case studies, starting with a pilot study of three, and commissioned a company, Oxford Economics, to carry it out.