The Power of Interdisciplinary Research - Astronomy and Medicine

Here's an interesting vid:

This video is an example of how interdisciplinary work can benefit two seemingly different fields. How could medicine be used to help astronomy (and vice-versa)? The idea of this video is to show how doctors use visual and segmentation techniques to search data and understand the course of disease. This is beneficial to astronomers as they have less advance tools to analyze their sky surveys and visualize their data. However, according to Harvard's IIC archive, astronomers are better able to share information with large group of scientists which could also benefit medicine.

Medical imaging is used to take non-invasive images inside the human body for diagnostic purposes. An example would be x-rays. Astronomical imaging (Astrophotography) is the recording of images through long time exposure to accumulate photons. It is essentially a huge camera, and to aim this camera requires the use of astronomical coordinates like right ascension, etc. One method is the use of X-rays to find objects like neutron stars or black holes (since the material being sucked in emit x-rays - perhaps more on that later...).

Seeing that both disciplines use imaging technologies and both need accurate x-ray pictures, it would be obvious to have an interdisciplinary team for the advancement research and medicine. For more on the subject, here are some links:

1) http://lhcb.ecm.ub.es/spd/pmt/Other%20sources/MedAstro.pdf
2) http://iic.seas.harvard.edu/research/astronomical-medicine

What I think Astronomers do...

This is an easy one.... astronomers are machines that convert coffee into discoveries of exoplanets, stars, galaxies and very interesting articles to read in between classes. Seriously, that's the first thing that pops into my mind when I hear the word "astronomer". But when I think further into the subject, I also see them in a labcoat. :) These people must be used to darkness. Their hours of operation make college all-nighters seem like a walk in the to them. But when I was young I thought about becoming an astronomer when I first held my first telescope (it was my brother's actually). The telescope didn't work... so there went the aspiration. So I satisfied my curiosity as to what astronomers do by simply gazing up at the sky in places where there is no light pollution. Here and there, throughout my life I did this and until college I just concluded that this is what they do: they look up at the sky just like we do, except they're paid to do so and have an interest of our universe as it was during its earliest times. Not only that but they study the formation of planets, stars, galaxies and perhaps how our sun affects our planet in a more comprehensive level. Since I'm barely taking a course in Astronomy, I expect to have a much broader perspective at the end of quarter.

So I searched online and read a bit of what they do. Among the webpages an interesting interdisciplinary video that will be mentioned next time. Their work throughout time has immensely benefited us. For example, understanding the placement of constellations was a foundation for developing navigation in ancient times.  Nowadays, organizations like NASA make it very easy to see how astronomy affects us by showing spinoff technologies that made its way to our everyday lives. In fact here's the link: http://spinoff.nasa.gov/ .

Check it out:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=156166291

Galactic Bones?!

So I read an interesting articles about a new structure that astronomers found in our solar system, called "Galactic Bones". They're long straight filaments of dust and gas that stretch out through the spiral arms of galaxies; observed at infrared wavelengths of light. The picture above is the bone named after the dust cloud nicknamed "Nessie." More specifically, this bone is part of the Scutum-Centaurus arm. This bone was observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope spans 300 light-years (length) by 1-2 light-years (wide).





What makes Nessie interesting is that it's high density sets if apart from its surroundings suggests that its a "spine-like feature that runs down the center of the Scutum-Centaurus Arm of the Milky Way."  Nessie can halp us mao the full skeleton of the Milky Way. From my understanding, it is thought as impossible to have an overhead view of the Milky Way because we pretty much live "in" the plane - as if we are flatlanders. But the sun's tiny distance above the plane helps with a 3D perspective of the the galaxy. Here's the thought experiment: 

(Straight from the Article)

Carry out the following thought experiment. Draw a rough plan of a spiral galaxy on a piece of paper. Position a vantage point a tiny distance (a few hundredths of an inch) above that piece of paper, about two-thirds of the way out from the center of the galaxy. Now give the observer at that vantage point super-sharp eyesight and ask if the observer can separate the spiral arm features you drew, as they observe them. They can–if and only if the spiral you drew has very narrow features defining its arms. If the observer were exactly in the piece of paper (living in Flatland), separating the arms would be impossible, regardless of their width. We are, like your observer, are at a tiny, tiny, elevation off of a spiral galaxy, and our visiion is good enough to separate very skinny arm-like features.

I drew some sketches of how I understood the thought experiment:

Here are the links for this subject:

http://milkywaybones.org/
https://www.authorea.com/users/23/articles/249/_show_article#fig__colon__topview
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/01/astronomers-discover-new-structure-at-milky-way-core-4.html