Provider Syndrome

There has been enough talk already about "Imposter Syndrome" among astronomers. It is basically the feeling that one should not be in the field because everyone else is more qualified/smarter etc and one is going to be found out any minute. It is something most critical thinking people suffer from.
Or should...I'd see it as a sign of psychopathy if one didn't...

But here I want to note something that (maybe) predominantly affects men in Astronomy because of the way society is still structured. As soon as one has a family, i.e. actual "dependents", people who depend on you for everything (talking about kids, cats are not people), men tend to get a bit more competitive/serious about their job.

It's "provider syndrome". YOU are SOLELY responsible for these wee ones to have enough diapers/food/playstations to consume. Also: please fight off all predators.
Since the last item is not really on the list, society implicitly assumes you can't do things like parent (I mean the bar would be subterranean if it were any lower), all the pressure is to "provide".

Funny enough this is not actually in many points of peer-to-peer contact (like the issues we keep hearing about that women in STEM face, I mean oh boy) but it is deeply ingrained in our culture.
For example, no one would take a male postdoc serious if he opted for an 80% contract (I mean that is just negotiating a paycut right? Macho culture at work).

But the funny thing is: the pressure really IS on. With the physical demands of kids and the fun ways postdoc positions *rarely* seem to come with work visa/opportunities for spouses, the male postdoc *is* the provider in a competitive field. It reminds me of the T-shirt that says "if the zombie apocalypse comes, I'm tripping you". Probably. The kids will get away.

The Dust in Nearby Galaxies Workshop in memory of Chad Engelbracht

This week I went to Tucson for the workshop on "Observations of Dust in Nearby Galaxies - a workshop in memory of Chad Engelbracht" (link).

It was organized by Joannah Hinz. She's cool. She invited me to give talk! My first invited talk on dust in galaxies, a topic I've been working on since grad school! So. very. cool. For the longest time, I was scrambling to get the finances for the trip. Then Karl Gordon ok'ed to pay for my flight using our NHEMESES Herschel program's NASA funding! Wooo! I got to go!! Flying in just after Thanksgiving and I got back in time for Sinterklaas. Joannah even let me stay with her! Told you she's cool.

The reason we had the workshop as dust in nearby galaxies was the topic Chad Engelbracht was most interested in. He worked on the Spitzer Space Telescope and produced a lot of very good work with it. Almost everyone had a funny Chad story in their talk. Often involving Quake.

So this was the guy who got Tim Pickering so hooked on that game that he installed it on the UNIX system in Groningen...

I met Chad a few times and we worked on two SINGS papers together. Like most people at the workshop already said and I will reiterate: he was a kind and competent person. I remember him being encouraging on a paper that was slowly turning into a bit of a monster. I presented the results at a conference in Rome (where I met Joannah for the first time as well) and I used the "spherical cow" example. Someone used it as well at the workshop! I immediately wanted to find that talk and specifically that slide. It's not on my laptop. too many computers ago.

He was a kind person (well except in Quake) with a sucky disease. Chad will be missed.

Chad Fest Day 0

The conference in memory of Chard Engelbracht is happening tomorrow.
Thoday is T-0. I visited Steward observatory and chatted to people during beer+pizza at the infamous 1702 restaurant. Now I finally know what Fish is on about.

Met up with Tim Pickering again. He was one of Chad's friends in grad school. In general the meeting has a bit of "boys back together" feel to it.

Meanwhile Joannah Hinz has been awesome in helping me. For example, she dropped me at El Target for my US shopping! All the while picking up people from the airport and organizing this conference. Oh and I get to stay in her guest bedroom too! Awesome.

Arxiv to bibdesk

A long time ago (in a Baltimore far far away), I met a summer student named Jonathan Sick. He is a very good Python Programmer and he made a script that allows one to add a astro-ph page or ads page to the bibdesk program. It's clever.

I never got it to work.

Then I saw another tweet by him today and gave it another go.

oh myyyyy how have I been getting along without this?
Smooth ingestion of everything I wanted to save on astroph. Much easier bibliography work.

*staples fingers* eeexcellent

Hubble Cycle-26 TAC results

Thoughts on the Hubble Space Telescope Cycle-26 results.

The results on the HST cycle-26 are out and there has been a lot of hay made of the improvement in gender balance in the results. It made me think about how the decision process in groups goes. I was reading how in times of stress (say a <3 day decision making process) people fall back on “what everyone knows” and “common knowledge”.

The argument was that people let some rote or authoritarian argument sway them if they are overwhelmed. And I think that is a decisive factor in the imbalance in previous cycles. When overwhelmed, consciously or unconsciously, go with the team you’ve heard of. Not necessarily your mates etc but people you know.

So I think it’s great that the information is now not being passed on to the TAC. Other organizations are similarly exploring double blind evaluations. ESO did an experiment with crowd sourced TAC. Interesting and much improved feedback (in my experience). Though no double blind yet.

Oh and only if funding agencies would do the same. They still ask for massive amounts of personal information. Resume, letters, publication lists etc etc. why? Why not simply focus on the science? And just that? I would be *very* interested to see if that would change the gender balance of NASA, NSF and ERC rewards.

But I also want to see what the next Hubble TAC result looks like. This cycle was...a mess. An experiment...perhaps successful...but massively oversubscribed. The experiment needs confirmation.

z~8 galaxy sizes

Got sick of struggling with SED fits of dwarfs... so I worked on z~8 galaxy sizes. I had done *much* more that I remembered. The paper is 80% done?

And it was Robin's first day at work with UNAWE! woo!

Trip to Tucson is approved and booked. Only now to have a get my talk together.

All I so far is Scrat images... those will come in handy.

Clearing the hopper. Co-authors! C'mon. Going for a personal best

latest draft of a small paper on the link between morphology and normalized specific angular momentum with Danail. Email with Australia. so. 24hr cycle.

Trying to figure out what is going on with my SED fits of Brown Dwarfs in CANDELS.

Proofs of second-ever Supernova paper are in. Third supernova paper needs to go back to MNRAS.
(waiting for co-author).

Trip to Tucson is coming down to the wire. hope someone will book me a flight (likely to be through Novisibirsk at this rate...) soon...
I would like to give my first ever invited talk.

Preparing talk. So far I have a lot of images of Scrat.

How I thought of the Philae lander. Yeah that tweet got more retweets than *everything I've done before*. Go scrat...

IAU invite

Sooo. I got an invitation to speak at the IAU in Hawaii next year.
This is nice. I hear Hawaii is a nice place. All is good.

End of announcement. Back to paper writing.

4 years in the making...SNIa and their host extinction properties

Back in South Africa (a postdoc, a kid, two moves, a continent, and a lifetime ago) I worked with a summer student, Adam Reynolds, on the possibility of using the SDSS-III data to use Supernovea Type Ia (SNIa) as probes of the ISM. The idea worked in principle on the --then public-- SDSS-III data but to be really convincing, we'd need their final data-release.
This was a few years in the making but finally arrived in 2014 (huzzah!). I dug out Adam's report and converted it to a small paper (script everything folks...). My interest is of course the distribution of extinction values, could not give a fig about SNIa...

The results are interesting. SNIa effectively "see" a dust screen (inclination dependence is cos(i), nothing more fancy) and their distribution is roughly exponential. The latter is weird, based on everything I've seen (PHAT survey results, occulting galaxy pairs), one would expect a log-normal one. I suspect that is what it really is but right now an exponential is used in SNIa measurements.

The gist of the current paper is Host Galaxy Inclination Matters!

So constructing the next version of SNIa cosmology, should start by taking disk inclination into account as the first host observable to be included. My second guess is host mass. But that is the second paper (already submitted...)

After that, one would need to redo the lightcurves with different extinction priors. To provide the templates for that, I got my STARSMOG HST SNAP program. The ultimate goal is here to reduce the errors in SNIa to below 1%. That'll keep them competitive as a cosmological tool.

That'll keep me busy. All that from a side-interest...

you can find the paper here:

SNIa Host Galaxy Properties and the Dust Extinction Distribution

Supernovae Type Ia display a complex relation with their host galaxies. An important prior to the fit of the supernovae's lightcurve is the distribution of host galaxy extinction values that can be encountered. The SDSS-SN project has published light curve fits using both MLCS2k2 and SALT2. We use the former fits extinction parameter (AV) to map this distribution of extinction values.
We explore the dependence of this distribution on four observables; the inclination of the host galaxy disk, radial position of the supernova, redshift of the supernova and host, and the level of star-formation in the host galaxy. The distribution of AV values encountered by supernovae is typically characterised by: N0 e−AV/τ, with τ= 0.4 or 0.33.
We find that the inclination correction using an infinitely thin disk for the SNIa is sufficient, resulting in similar exponential AV distributions for high- and low-inclination disks. The AV distribution also depends on the radial position in the disk, consistent with previous results on the transparency of spiral disks. The distribution of AV values narrows with increased star-formation, possibly due to the destruction or dispersion of the dusty ISM by stellar winds prior to the ignition of the supernova.
In future supernova searches, certainly the inclination of the host galaxy disk, should be considered in the construction of the \av \ prior with τ=0.4/cos(i) as the most likely prior in each individual host galaxy's case.

ESO proposals in with time to spare

...and with time to spare I mean 7 min...

three went in. GAMA groups proposal was in first. occulting group one next. Then a KMOS high-redshift one last.

egads. working so close to a deadline is not my thing.

Fair use of Hubble Images

Hubble images, especially those pretty ones made available through the Hubble Heritage (link), are free to use by everyone. Sometimes by some kind-of-fringy people or plain astrologers. I have seen some professional astronomers lose their cool as their image got sued for a Astrology ad for example.

My attitude is: "Hey, the public paid for these images and everyone in that public gets to use them. Any and all of them. That's fair use."

So imagine my surprise when I got an email regarding my occulting galaxy image (the wallpaper of this blog etc etc) by an author of an alternative galaxy evolution model.

Here is the excerpt he sent me that talked about the overlapping pair:

Case Study of 2MASX J00482185-2507365.    You are on your own, Lil’ Doggy.

In the next illustration the secondarily formed nucleus is considerably smaller than the primary body.  A case of mitosis?  If it is, then a fragment or the tail end of a bar nucleus was dislocated and forcefully and speedily flung for some distance from the galaxy’s center.  It lodged there above the ‘mother’ galaxy, where it has begun to construct its own galaxy of stars.  So small, but it seems to have retained a preference for the bar shape. [Any suggested names for this ‘newbie’ galaxy?]  

  Image of 2MASX J00482185-2507365. Credit  NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI, AURA, B. Holwerda, Space Telescope Science Institute, J. Dalcanton U. of Washington

            Before reaching its present location this ‘offspring’ galaxy was a clump of heavy black holes. Perhaps less than 10% of the original nucleus, it still weighed as much as several hundred thousand Suns, perhaps millions.  As it soared through the inner most galaxy and partially through the spiral rings it caused some minor alteration of the star orbits in those areas, which is apparent in the image, minor effects because of its great speed.  Run-away stars and black holes have been well documented.  These are the losers of a gravity contest between two or more big boss bodies.  So, this junior galaxy quickly got to where it wanted to be, then slowed enough to start its own family of stars.  Again, runaways are slowed by the capture of dark matter and increasing weight.  Its present site is ideal for capturing inflowing dark matter.  (Dark matter is instrumental in star formation.)

[Someone want to calculate how long it took to reach the present location?] 

(It is asserted here that the Milky Way nucleus is preparing for a similar event.  See The Case of the Twisted Ring at the Center of the Milky Way, July 20, 2011.)

[Reminder:  Scientists state that no such action is possible because the nucleus is just one oversized black hole that never breaks up or decomposes.  (Except for some vague exceptions.)]

One of the characteristics that distinguish Mitosis from the more common merger of galaxies is the absence of gravitational or pressure waves.  The two entities do not interfere with each other.  Reasons given elsewhere.  

-------------

I will not even pretend I understand the logic but I am flattered that someone got inspired by the picture I helped create (props really go to JD and the Hubble Heritage team) and I appreciate being told about its use. 

HST Cycle-22 Results

So after battling insomnia thanks to the Giant Unspecified Anxiety that I am apparently sensitive to from time to time, I got the results for the Cycle 22 HST proposals early. I had put in three as PI and was invited to a bunch more. The results were in. Two successful ones as PI and two as co-I. A bumper crop year!

The halo of M101 is going to be studied in detail with WFC3 adn ACS with the GHOSTS team and 150 occulting galaxy pairs are going to be the target for a SNAP project. V. cool. Especially the last one is a personal validation after several years in second quartile.

The other two (co-I) are z=9-10 galaxy surveys. One over the CANDELS field and one using the BoRG strategy. Very complementary. v. cool. And fits nice with my latest paper on z=9-10 galaxy sizes and my ongoing project to identify cool Milky Way.

So much SCIENCE!

Definitely a win. Bring me all the bagels and muffins in the land.

The kids playhouse lessons of project management

I have spent a few days spread over thelast months trying to build a swanky play house for the kids. The house itself has been met with approval by its customers, indicating i did a decent enough job.

Coupleof things that happened while building:

- small injury. Handeling wood and tools make scrapes etc inevitable.
- delay due to weather.
- goingback to the hardware store for that thing that I forgot.
- a thing that took longer.
- something that the instructional video made look trivial but wasn’t.
- back to the store for two more planks.
- it took longer.
- late stage suggestions for improvements.

Doesn’t this all sound familiar? With theexception of the more trips to the hardware store than originally anticipated, pretty much all of these are artifacts of astronomy projects. Such things pop up with every project. I have done two projects with woodworking around the house and immediately i can tell you there is a HUGE difference in the documentation. Vague instructions demand lots of improvisation and take much longer (playhoise) and detailed cut list makes it go very quick and smooth (work bench).
additional trips are inevitable but with a clear plan can be cut down significantly.

Small injury amd delay are inevitable. Weather will happen.

But it feels like we have to delude ourselves some every time in order to get started. If the first thought for a project would be “definitely going to need some bandaids during this”, we’d never get started. Same in astronomy I wager.

Is there a part-time phd?

In Europe there are no or hardly any part-time PhDs in astronomy. There used to people that would be on the dole until they finished the PhD. Strickter funding and other rules put mostly an end to that.

Of course there is a PhD comic on the topic.

Not so in the USA where not only do the students pay for the classes but it strongly depends on year-to-year funding. So many people do a phd on the side. Next to a full time job.

So how to set that up? The research part of a phd is a lot harder to do part time. It’s deep work. Hard to get back into after distractions. The kind you do while concentrating on a topic for a long time.
I may now have one or two people who will do a phd with me over many years. Does anyone have experience with the part time PhD student? And how to help them over the finish line?

No idea yet.

Students! Here for SCIENCE! And summer.

This year I am the LEAPS program coordinator together with the ruthlessly organized Catherine Walsh. We work well together. Logistically "interesting" problem, getting everyone from everywhere to Leiden and housed and set up etc. I am the local-Dutch-speaker-in-charge-of-yelling-at-people.
Most have arrived now and are getting started (getting bikes for example). Some final details regarding the four outings to be sorted out.

Funny how exhausting and time-consuming this program is. Fun too.

Excuse me while I call a man about a missing toilet seat. Ah science.

A null-result

A little while back, I asked for SINFONI data on a suspected high-redshift QSO. If we were lucky, we would get the Lyman Alpha emission (and maybe a few other emission lines) redshift right into the J-band. ESO awarded 3 hours of observing time.

That left me with SINFONI data and I don't know how to reduce it and since no more is likely forthcoming (I have no other program doing this) I was wondering if someone else could help. Enter Tiffany and Marissa. Marissa is a SINFONI expert and Tiffany wanted to learn how to run her pipeline. So they got to work. The result was a perfectly clean data-cube.

I extracted the spectrum where I hoped the QSO (of T-dwarf that's cool too) would be.

Here's the result:
A more experienced spectroscopist will recognize this as just sky lines all over...

ho hum.

BUt not to worry! There was a secondary target we could extract. A z~2 galaxy for which some kinematics could be determined. That would be neat too.

Below is where SINFONI ended up pointing. See the blob just outside the FOV. Yeah that's the z~2 galaxy. 
 

Sorry ESO. This run was a complete bust.

Do I now write this up and post it on astro-ph? What does one do if there is no result to report? Astronomy does not deal well with null result. They don't get reported.