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Canadian Institute For Theoretical Astrophysics
The Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA) is a national research institute funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, located at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CITA's mission is "to foster interaction within the Canadian theoretical Astrophysics community and to serve as an international center of excellence for theoretical studies in astrophysics." CITA was incorporated in 1984. CITA has close administrative and academic relations with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR); several CITA faculty also serve as members of CIFAR. History The concept of a nationally supported institute for theoretical astrophysics dates back to discussions within the Canadian Astronomical Society in the early 1980s. A series of committees advocated a model of a university‑based institute governed by a council of Canadian astrophysicists. Proposals were solicited from universities across the country to host this institute, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Research Institute
A research institute, research centre, or research organization is an establishment founded for doing research. Research institutes may specialize in basic research or may be oriented to applied research. Although the term often implies natural science research, there are also many research institutes in the social science as well, especially for sociological and historical research purposes. Famous research institutes In the early medieval period, several astronomical observatories were built in the Islamic world. The first of these was the 9th-century Baghdad observatory built during the time of the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun, though the most famous were the 13th-century Maragheh observatory, and the 15th-century Ulugh Beg Observatory. The Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics was a school of mathematics and astronomy founded by Madhava of Sangamagrama in Kerala, India. The school flourished between the 14th and 16th centuries and the original discoveries of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CIFAR
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a Canadian-based global research organization that brings together teams of top researchers from around the world to address important and complex questions. It was founded in 1982 and is supported by individuals, foundations and corporations, as well as funding from the Government of Canada and the provinces of Alberta and Quebec. Operations CIFAR staff supports more than 400 researchers from 21 countries and more than 140 institutions. Approximately half of the researchers are based in Canada and half are located abroad. The President and CEO is directly responsible to the Chair and the Board of Directors, who are responsible for funding allocation and approval of research programs. In November 2022, Stephen Toope became president and CEO. Irfhan Rawji is the chair of CIFAR's Board of Directors. Jacqueline Koerner and Anne McLellan serve as co-vice chairs. CIFAR receives funding from a blend of governments, partnerships (r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fast Radio Burst
In radio astronomy, a fast radio burst (FRB) is a transient radio wave of length ranging from a fraction of a millisecond, for an ultra-fast radio burst, to 3 seconds, caused by a high-energy astrophysical process as yet not understood. Astronomers estimate the average FRB releases as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun puts out in three days. While extremely energetic at their source, the strength of the signal reaching Earth has been described as 1,000 times less than from a mobile phone on the Moon. The first FRB was discovered by Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkevic in 2007 when they were looking through archival pulsar survey data, and it is therefore commonly referred to as the Lorimer burst. Many FRBs have since been recorded, including several that have been detected repeating in seemingly irregular ways. Only one FRB has been detected to repeat in a regular way: FRB 180916 seems to pulse every 16.35 days. Most FRBs are extragalactic, but the first Milky Wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magnetars
A magnetar is a type of neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field (~109 to 1011 T, ~1013 to 1015 G). The magnetic-field decay powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays.Ward; Brownlee, p.286 The existence of magnetars was proposed in 1992 by Robert Duncan and Christopher Thompson following earlier work by Katz on the Soft Gamma Repeater SGR 0525-66, then called a gamma-ray burst. Their proposal sought to explain the properties of transient sources of gamma rays, now known as soft gamma repeaters (SGRs). Over the following decade, the magnetar hypothesis became widely accepted, and was extended to explain anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs). , 24 magnetars have been confirmed. It has been suggested that magnetars are the source of fast radio bursts (FRB), in particular as a result of findings in 2020 by scientists using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope. Description Like oth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neutron Stars
A neutron star is the gravitationally collapsed core of a massive supergiant star. It results from the supernova explosion of a massive star—combined with gravitational collapse—that compresses the core past white dwarf star density to that of atomic nuclei. Surpassed only by black holes, neutron stars are the second smallest and densest known class of stellar objects. Neutron stars have a radius on the order of and a mass of about . Stars that collapse into neutron stars have a total mass of between 10 and 25 solar masses (), or possibly more for those that are especially rich in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Once formed, neutron stars no longer actively generate heat and cool over time, but they may still evolve further through collisions or accretion. Most of the basic models for these objects imply that they are composed almost entirely of neutrons, as the extreme pressure causes the electrons and protons present in normal matter to combine into additi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cosmic Inflation
In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation, or just inflation, is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the very early universe. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate. The re-acceleration of this slowing expansion due to dark energy began after the universe was already over 7.7 billion years old (5.4 billion years ago). Inflation theory was developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with notable contributions by several theoretical physicists, including Alexei Starobinsky at Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Alan Guth at Cornell University, and Andrei Linde at Lebedev Physical Institute. Starobinsky, Guth, and Linde won the 2014 Kavli Prize "for pioneering the theory of cosmic inflation". It was developed further in the early 1980s. It explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary region, magnified t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intensity Mapping
In cosmology, intensity mapping is an observational technique for surveying the large-scale structure of the universe by using the integrated radio emission from unresolved gas clouds. In its most common variant, 21 cm intensity mapping, the 21 cm emission line of neutral hydrogen is used to trace the gas. The hydrogen follows fluctuations in the underlying cosmic density field, with regions of higher density giving rise to a higher intensity of emission. Intensity fluctuations can therefore be used to reconstruct the power spectrum of matter fluctuations. The frequency of the emission line is redshifted by the expansion of the Universe, so by using radio receivers that cover a wide frequency band, one can detect this signal as a function of redshift, and thus cosmic time. This is similar in principle to a galaxy redshift survey, with the important distinction that galaxies need to be individually detected and measured, making intensity mapping a considerably faster method. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cosmic Microwave Background
The cosmic microwave background (CMB, CMBR), or relic radiation, is microwave radiation that fills all space in the observable universe. With a standard optical telescope, the background space between stars and galaxies is almost completely dark. However, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope detects a faint background glow that is almost isotropic, uniform and is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other astronomical object, object. This glow is strongest in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The accidental Discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, discovery of the CMB in 1965 by American radio astronomers Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson was the culmination of work initiated in the 1940s. The CMB is landmark evidence of the Big Bang scientific theory, theory for the origin of the universe. In the Big Bang cosmological models, during the earliest periods, the universe was filled with an Opacity (optics), opaque fog of dense, hot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cosmology
Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe, the cosmos. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', with the meaning of "a speaking of the world". In 1731, German philosopher Christian Wolff used the term cosmology in Latin (''cosmologia'') to denote a branch of metaphysics that deals with the general nature of the physical world. Religious or mythological cosmology is a body of beliefs based on mythological, religious, and esoteric literature and traditions of creation myths and eschatology. In the science of astronomy, cosmology is concerned with the study of the chronology of the universe. Physical cosmology is the study of the observable universe's origin, its large-scale structures and dynamics, and the ultimate fate of the universe, including the laws of science that govern these areas. It is investigated by scientists, including astronomers and physicists, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Thompson (astronomer)
Christopher Thompson (born 1961) is a Canadian astronomer and astrophysicist. He is a professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA). Thompson received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1988. His thesis discussed the cosmological effects of superconducting strings. His advisor was Jeremiah P. Ostriker. He is a former faculty member of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1992, Thompson first proposed the existence of magnetars with Robert Duncan. They were awarded the Bruno Rossi Prize for their work in 2003. In 2018, Thompson was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; , SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bilingual council of distinguishe ... Academy of Science, Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Referenc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nick Kaiser
Nicholas Kaiser (15 September 1954 – 13 June 2023) was a British cosmologist. He is the son of Thomas Reeve Kaiser. Life and career Kaiser received his Bachelor's in physics at Leeds University in 1978, and his Part III in maths at University of Cambridge in 1979. He obtained his PhD in astronomy, also at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Martin Rees. After postdoctoral positions at University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Sussex, and University of Cambridge, Kaiser was Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics Professor at the University of Toronto (1988–1997). In 1998 he moved to become Professor at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaiʻi. From 2017 to 2022 he was Professor at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Kaiser was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008. Kaiser died of heart failure on 13 June 2023, at the age of 68. Works Kaiser made major contributions to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
