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Better Inclusion, Better Science, Building Impact in MW-GAIA
Vilnius, Lithuania, July 3 - 5, 2023
 
Contributed talks

Fraser Lewis, National Schools' Observatory and Faulkes Telescope Project, UK

Using Gaia to Study Supernovae [pdf]

I will present details of a Citizen Science type activity that allows students to work with real astronomical data to study supernovae. In particular, this activity focuses on Type Ia supernovae, allowing participants an insight into the cosmological links between supernovae and the age of the Universe. This activity is at the National Schools' Observatory website (https://www.schoolsobservatory.org/) where it sits alongside other projects on open clusters and exoplanets.


 

Marco Castellani, INAF - Rome Astronomical Observatory, Italy

Too much stars in the Galaxy? Gaia will handle this! [pdf]

The Milky Way it's a very complex and articulate environment. We already know that some places, as globular clusters, will constitute a real challenge for Gaia, because of the very high density of stars. I will show how Gaia can handle such complex situations and how it can disentangle partial overlapped stellar spectra, describing the basis of a data handling that will turn Gaia in a wonderful instrument to investigate our Galaxy.


 

Olga Suarez, Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, France

Gaia in the classroom: educational activities [pdf]

Several activities have been developed at the Côte d'Azur Observatory (Nice, France), in partnership with ESA, to introduce the different concepts needed for making middle and high-school kids understand Gaia.


 

Arndt Latusseck, Gymnasium Jospehinum / Haus der Astronomie, Germany

The glowing scale tape: A teacher's approach to discovering the cosmic distance ladder through Gaia's photometry data [pdf]

In this talk, I present examples from my high school astronomy courses, of how Gaia data may be used to discover important concepts of the Milky Way. Apart from the obvious approach to mainly use trigonometric parallaxes to develop a picture of our cosmic environment, I take my students a different way by starting where their everyday experience ends: To them, the starry sky is, more or less, a 2D surface, with no obvious three-dimensional structure. So I let them, to some degree, reconstruct the path astronomers had taken, starting with easily observable parameters, particularly coordinates, stellar brightnesses, and their colors. I will show examples of how, by simply using these three parameters from the Gaia DR2 catalogue, the students are enabled to develop basic insights into the 3D structure of our Milky Way and even beyond, into the Local Group of galaxies, easily surpassing the (trigonometric) distance limitations of even Gaia.


 

Ludving Cano, Max Schreier Planetarium, Bolivia

Implementation of astronomy activities with real data on high-school students in Bolivia

We describe the implementation of three hands-on astronomy activities applied to high school senior and junior students during a workshop held in September to October 2020, exploring the difficulties, advantages and giving a guide about how to recreate these activities on virtual teaching. We also describe a panorama about astronomy education in Bolivia.


 

Lerothodi Leeuw, University of the Western Cape, South Africa

The Milky Way or Molagodimo in the Setswana Language [pdf]

We will present ancient and modern ideas of the Milky Way, or Molagodimo in the Setswana Language, the ancient borrowing from ideas of the peoples of Southern Africa. The talk will explore knowledge development from the ancient to the present using the Milky Way and peoples of Southern Africa as examples.


 

Rosa M. Ros, Beatriz García, Ricardo Moreno, Eder Viñuales and Alexandre Costa, Network for Astronomy School Education (NASE-IAU), Spain

NASE teaching and science communication: a more inclusive focus

The main goal of NASE is to promote communication of science by means of astronomy with the main objective to promote new science vocations mainly between girls. 

NASE introduces Astronomy in an innovative way and the program is based on the hands-on-activities with simple, not expensive resources and tools, without resigning the excellence in the level of transmission of the contents, promoting more inclusive education and science communication, in particular with blind people.

The program started the global actions in 2009 (and continues) organizes courses for teachers in America, Asia, Africa, and Europe. In total, more than 220 courses were performed

In 2020, the new modality online synchronous was offered with very good reception, and many lessons were learned. The online approach offers the opportunity to increase personal contact with the participants as well as the number of women teachers that participate in our courses.


 

Nataly Ospina, RECA Red Estudiantes Colombianos Astronomia, University of Padova, Colombia/Italy

Bringing astronomy to schools in Colombia [pdf[

The Colombian astronomy students network (RECA, for its acronym in Spanish) aims to create and maintain strong connections among astronomy students in Colombia with the final goal of encouraging the development of Astronomy in the country. Among the different actions that are being carried out, and motivated by the growing interest in Astronomy in Colombia, we are trying to bring astronomy to schools in the country. As a pilot project, with one school in Bogota, we have designed different activities focused on the needs of the school. In this talk, we will present the different proposed activities and initiatives. Moreover, this workshop will allow us to prepare new activities for schools based on the use of the Milky Way as a learning tool.


 

Ilídio André Costa, Santa Bárbara School / Porto Planetarium - Ciência Viva Center / Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, Portugal

Citizen science for schools: bridging research, science communication and science education

CoAstro: @n Astronomy Condo is a citizen science project that directly connected five astronomers, nine primary school teachers, four science communicators, and one mediator, in order to find new ways to carry out scientific dissemination of content, but also of processes, promoting positive attitudes towards science. CoAstro allowed us to understand how a citizen science project can contribute, with lasting and wide-public-ranging effects, to open the school to the surrounding community and vice-versa and how the public can open up to astronomy research and the latter to the public.


 

María Pilar Orozco-Sáenz, Colegio Huerta de la Cruz, Algeciras, Spain

Habitable zone: where to search for life in the Solar System

An accurate definition of the habitable zone is of great importance for the search for life on planets other than the Earth. The habitable zone is customarily defined as the range of orbits around a star within which a planetary surface can support liquid water given sufficient atmospheric pressure. Other requirements are that the greenhouse effect does not increase temperatures above a determined threshold, that volcanic activity does not drastically increase this greenhouse effect, that the planet owns a magnetic field strong enough for protection against highly-charged particles, or that the planetary albedo is not too high.

Just like the planetary systems, a habitable zone can be also defined for galaxies. The habitable zone of a galaxy are usually located from the center of the galaxy within a radius ranging from 13000 to about 33000 light-years, about a half of the galactic disk. Further away from this limit, the metallicity of the stars is too low to allow the formation of telluric planets like the Earth, and at distances closer to the galactic center conditions for life are more hostile due to the higher exposition to more energetic and violent events like supernovas or black holes.

The Earth and our solar system are located at a radius of 27000 light years from the center of the Milky Way, within this habitable zone in the galaxy. But although on the Earth more than 8,7 millions living species can be found, closer planets like Venus or Mars or our Moon are apparently inhabitable, presumably due to the lack of liquid water, an atmosphere without compounds essential for known life chemistry, or a magnetosphere capable of protecting against cosmic radiation.

Present advances in science and technology have permitted life to expand beyond traditional limitations. Onboard the International Space Station, astronauts have experienced periods of many months exposed to conditions different to the terrestrial surface, experiments with other forms of life have been undertaken in microgravity, and manned missions to Mars are currently being planned. For these reasons, studying the capacity of adaptation of terrestrial life to more extreme conditions is a crucial task.

Here we present the main results of a study about the growth of plants in conditions different to the Earth and undertaken by school students aged 14-15 years old from the school Huerta de la Cruz (Algeciras, Spain). Since plants are autotroph (i.e. they can convert an abiotic source of energy like light into energy stored in organic compounds usable by other forms of life) they are critical for human life support in future manned missions and colonies on the Moon. In addition, the experiment would provide new clues for developing agriculture on other planets. The students studied the growth of chickpeas (Cicer arietinum L., 1753) and common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L., Sp. Pl., 1753) under conditions that simulated a long-term space journey. On the one hand, exposing these plants to different conditions of gravity: simulating microgravity through immersion into liquids and gels with different densities, and higher gravity simulated with the centrifugal force of a washing machine. On the other hand, different lamps were used to expose the plants to higher doses of radiation at X-ray, ultraviolet, and microwave wavelengths.


 

Antoaneta Antonova, Bulgarian Astronomical Society and Institute of Astronomy, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria

Successfully teaching astronomy in schools [pdf]

21st century Europe is facing a challenge to increase its scientific and technological know-how in order to be competitive on a global scale. An essential component of a healthy scientific venture is a scientifically literate and well-educated population. However, in most education systems in Central and Eastern Europe, teachers struggle to highlight the interrelation of subjects, due to lack of resources and sometimes even information on certain topics. This is extremely valid with regard to the instruction on astronomy-related topics.


 

Henri Boffin, ESO, Germany

Using April fool papers to teach astronomy [pdf]

In the past years, using Gaia and other data, I have published April fool papers on several topics. Although these papers are hopefully easy to read and, from the feedback received, also generate quite a few smiles and laughs, they are all based on scientifically accurate methods and data. They can serve as a good introduction to several astronomical notions, including exploiting Gaia data, for different levels of classes. I have prepared the relevant material for use in classrooms and I propose to present this here. The papers themselves are available at http://eso.org/~hboffin/Attic.html

 

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