High-Level Project Summary
We have developed an interactive animated website, in which you're going to experience a trip through space to get to know several types of variable stars and some of their features. The challenge wants us to teach about stellar variability. We believe the easiest way to learn about the subject is through an interactive website in which the user will be able to learn about different kinds of stellar variability processes such as pulsant stars or exoplanet transits. After the star selection process in which the user writes how it is feeling an animation is shown and several pieces of information will be shown about the star itself and the different variable phenomena.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
The challenge we chose is to find a way to teach about variable stars. People normally don't know how dynamic the night sky really is, they mostly think stars are just points of lights in the sky that always shine in the same way. To get people to know that stars are really much more complex is a difficult task to solve. To solve this problem, our project consists of a website in which users have the possibility of learning about stellar variability in an interesting and funny way. To capture the user's attention, we seek to create a sense of belonging by asking for a special date for them with which an area of space is shown. To select this area we transform the two numbers (day,month) into galactic coordinates (b,l) as you can see in the code available in the github link. Using these galactic coordinates we perform a cone search using astroquery in several catalogs. Many different variable effects can be found in catalogs. Let’s focus on four of them: Exoplanets transiting stars, Pulsant stars, binary systems and supernovae.
After this the website will ask the user what emotion this image evoque. According to the word given, the page moves to a particular point of that space where a star or astronomical phenomenon is shown. This is done by transforming the word given into a binary number and then using this number to choose one of the stars in the shown field which is suffering a variable effect, using the data given in the catalogs such as Gaia or GCVS.
An animation of the effect pops up and also shows basic information about the phenomena. The website also shows other 3 clickable options with the names of different variable stars in your chosen area, which are suffering different variable effects. This is important to show how common star activity is in space and encourage travel among stars seeing different phenomenons.
After the user finds a variable phenomena which catches their attention, an option of “reading more” it's provided, where more information provided by the different space agencies will be available.
Space Agency Data
The first thing that inspired our idea were the beautiful images that space telescopes have taken the past few decades. These all provide an easy way to catch the attention of the non-scientific public into science. We are all aware of the social impact that Hubble's pictures have had in the spread of space knowledge among society. Today, we not only have Hubble but other impressive telescopes taking mind-blowing images such as the James Webb Space Telescope which has already given us beautiful images. Apart from this data it is indispensable to use scientific data as well to give the proper information about the sky objects we use to teach star variability. As we described before, we encode the information given by the user into galactic latitude and galactic longitude to perform a cone search in the sky using Astropy. For example, ESA's Gaia mission has identified several thousands variable stars such as Cepheids and RR Lyraes but for certain variability purposes specific catalogs such as the General Catalog of Variable Stars is needed. Another example may be identification of exoplanet archives or future TESS mission discoveries. Apart from all the data available now we wanted to make clear that our idea will be enhanced by the future Vera Rubin Observatory which will revolutionize variability studies saving more than 1 petabytes of data per year (when the data becomes open to all astronomers). We haven’t had time to code all the crossmatches between all these different astrophysical event catalogs but we wanted to make clear that our idea can potentially use a wide variety of scientific data.
https://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/
https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/
Hackathon Journey
This instance was very useful for all the members of the team. We all improved our team work skills while we were meeting each other. All of us have learned at least a little bit more about stars and how dynamical they can be. Despite the difficulties we had during the two days as we met each other and got to know how to work together we had a lot of fun while creating the project. We definitely managed to build a fun and cool work space for all of us. We all had to contribute with creative and critical ideas, and all of us got satisfied with the results of the project at a certain level. This challenge inspired us, principally considering the fact that the stars are a beautiful subject to learn about; something that half of the members didn’t know a lot about, but everyone was interested in improving their knowledge. Stars is a theme that can attract everybody's attention easily, from a scientific perspective or just because night sky pictures look nice. We wanted to do this page because we feel that astronomy is a very interesting thing to study, at the same time it needs more people to collaborate with the investigations and different theories to continue evolving the science knowledge, so introducing people to astronomy is a good way to inspire young people to study, introducing them some material, which is easy to understand plus some more specific and advanced information for those who are already interested in the subject, attracting kids as well as teenagers or even adults.
The key to resolve the challenge was the absolute teamwork, thinking on absolutely the most details as it was possible, everybody giving our ideas and discussing them as well, everybody contributed with their fortresses, which could be programming, designing or even ideating, till we can reach an accomplishment in which everybody agrees, respecting all the time everybody's ideas and complaints.
References
Tags
#Stars #Variability #Webpage #Data