Helen Mason | |
---|---|
Born | Helen Elizabeth Mason |
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | Queen Mary University of London University of London [1] |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Physics |
Institutions | Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge |
Website | www |
Helen Elizabeth Mason OBE is a British theoretical physicist at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. She holds a Personal Readership in Solar Physics. [2] Helen Mason has been involved in many solar space projects such as Skylab, Yohkoh and the Solar Maximum Mission. She has been working as a co-investigator of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory project launched in 1995, and more recently on Hinode and the Solar Dynamics Observatory. She is a Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge. [3]
Helen Mason has contributed to a number of outreach projects in collaboration with the Millennium Mathematics Project and is currently leading the Sun|Trek project, an educational resource for teachers and students about the Sun and its effect on the Earth. [4] She has worked with school students in South Africa and India. She has given many talks to schools, astronomy societies and to the public. In 2013, she gave a Friday Evening Discourse on 'Our Dynamic Sun' at the Royal Institution.
Mason has been named as one of the "Women of Outstanding Achievement of 2010" in recognition of her work in communication within Science, Engineering and Technology (SET). [5] She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to higher education and to women in science, engineering, and technology. [6]
A corona is the outermost layer of a star's atmosphere. They are made up of plasma.
The Wolf number is a quantity that measures the number of sunspots and groups of sunspots present on the surface of the Sun.
The Low-Frequency Array, or LOFAR, is a large radio telescope network located mainly in the Netherlands, completed in 2012 by ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy and its international partners, and operated by ASTRON's radio observatory, of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
An RS Canum Venaticorum variable is a type of variable star. The variable type consists of close binary stars having active chromospheres which can cause large stellar spots. These spots are believed to cause variations in their observed luminosity. Systems can exhibit variations on timescales of years due to variation in the spot surface coverage fraction, as well as periodic variations which are, in general, close to the orbital period of the binary system. Some systems exhibit variations in luminosity due to their being eclipsing binaries. Typical brightness fluctuation is around 0.2 magnitudes. They take their name from the star RS Canum Venaticorum.
Solar physics is the branch of astrophysics that specializes in the study of the Sun. It deals with detailed measurements that are possible only for our closest star. It intersects with many disciplines of pure physics, astrophysics, and computer science, including fluid dynamics, plasma physics including magnetohydrodynamics, seismology, particle physics, atomic physics, nuclear physics, stellar evolution, space physics, spectroscopy, radiative transfer, applied optics, signal processing, computer vision, computational physics, stellar physics and solar astronomy.
Margaret J. Geller is an American astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Her work has included pioneering maps of the nearby universe, studies of the relationship between galaxies and their environment, and the development and application of methods for measuring the distribution of matter in the universe.
Eric Ronald Priest is Emeritus Professor at St Andrews University, where he previously held the Gregory Chair of Mathematics and a Bishop Wardlaw Professorship.
Gart Westerhout was a Dutch-American astronomer. Well before completing his university studies at Leiden, he had already become well-established internationally as a radio astronomer in the Netherlands, specializing in studies of radio sources and the Milky Way Galaxy based on observations of radio continuum emissions and 21-cm spectral line radiation that originates in interstellar hydrogen. He emigrated to the United States, became a naturalized citizen, and held a number of important scientific and management positions in academic and government institutions.
Astrophysical X-ray sources are astronomical objects with physical properties which result in the emission of X-rays.
The Women of Outstanding Achievement Photographic Exhibition was an annual event organised by the UKRC. It recognised women within science, engineering and technology (SET). The exhibition was created in 2006. Between six and eight women were chosen each year to be photographed by Robert Taylor. Nominations occur in the Autumn of each year and the recipients were announced at a ceremony in March of the following year.
Douglas Owen Gough FRS is a British astronomer, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Astrophysics in the University of Cambridge, and Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow.
AZ Cancri (AZ Cnc) is a M-type flare star in the constellation Cancer. It has an apparent visual magnitude of approximately 17.59.
Anne-Christine Davis is a British theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. She was the first woman to be appointed a professor in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University. Her research mainly concerns cosmology, astrophysics and string theory.
Louise Harra is a Northern Irish physicist, born in Lurgan, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. She is the Director of the World Radiation Centre of the Physical Meteorological Observatory in Davos (PMOD/WRC) and affiliated professor at the Institute of Particle Physics and Astrophysics of ETH Zurich.
The POlarization Emission of Millimeter Activity at the Sun (POEMAS) is a solar patrol system composed of two radio telescopes with superheterodyne circular polarization receivers at 45 and 90 GHz. Since their half power beam width is around 1.4°, they observe the full sun. The acquisition system allows to gather 100 values per second at both frequencies and polarizations, with a sensitivity of around 20 solar flux units (SFU) (1 SFU ≡ 104 Jy). The telescope saw first light in November 2011, and showed excellent performance during two years, when it observed many flares. Since November 2013 is stopped for repairing. The main interest of POEMAS is the observation of solar flares in a frequency range where there are very few detectors and fill the gap between microwaves observed with the Radio Solar Telescope Network (1 to 15.4 GHz) and submillimeter observations of the Solar Submillimeter Telescope (212 and 405 GHz). Moreover, POEMAS is the only current telescope capable of carrying on circular polarization solar flare observations at 90 GHz. (Although, in principle, ALMA band 3 may also observe at 90 GHz with circular polarization).
Supra-arcade downflows (SADs) are sunward-traveling plasma voids that are sometimes observed in the Sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, during solar flares. In solar physics, arcade refers to a bundle of coronal loops, and the prefix supra indicates that the downflows appear above flare arcades. They were first described in 1999 using the Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT) on board the Yohkoh satellite. SADs are byproducts of the magnetic reconnection process that drives solar flares, but their precise cause remains unknown.
Katharine Reeves is an astronomer who works at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
Albert Bijaoui is a French astronomer, former student of the Ecole Polytechnique, renowned in image processing in astrophysics and its application in cosmology, he then prepared his PhD thesis at the Paris Observatory, under the supervision of André Lallemand. He defended his thesis at the Université Denis Diderot in March 1971.