Representing noise: stacked plots and the contrasting diplomatic ambitions of radio astronomy and post-punk.

Sketched in 1979 by graphic designer Peter Saville, the record sleeve of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures seemingly popularized one of the most celebrated radio-astronomical images: the 'stacked plot' of radio signals from a pulsar. However, the sleeve's designer did not have this promotion in mind. Instead, he deliberately muddled the message it originally conveyed in a typical post-punk act of artistic sabotage. In reconstructing the historical events associated with this subversive effort, this essay explores how, after its adoption as an imaging device utilized in radio astronomy, the stacked plot gave representation to the diplomacy agendas of two distinct groups. The post-punk reworking of the stacked plot exemplified the ambition of this artistic movement to attack the images associated with social conventions and norms by amplifying their 'semantic noise', and, in so doing, seeking to negotiate a social space for those sharing these subversive goals. Conversely, radio astronomers used the stacked plot to display the presence of interfering radio transmitters in the frequencies exclusively allocated to astronomical research, thus advocating the removal of this electronic noise in the context of international telecommunication negotiations. The article thus shows how the representation of different types of noise through similar images shaped contrasting ambitions in the separate domains of science diplomacy and everyday diplomacy.

SUTO-Solar Through-Turbulence Open Image Dataset.

Imaging through turbulence has been the subject of many research papers in a variety of fields, including defence, astronomy, earth observations, and medicine. The main goal of such research is usually to recover the original, undisturbed image, in which the impact of spatially dependent blurring induced by the phase modulation of the light wavefront is removed. The number of turbulence-disturbed image databases available online is small, and the datasets usually contain repeating types of ground objects (cars, buildings, ships, chessboard patterns). In this article, we present a database of solar images in widely varying turbulence conditions obtained from the SUTO-Solar patrol station recorded over a period of more than a year. The dataset contains image sequences of distinctive yet randomly selected fragments of the solar chromosphere and photosphere. Reference images have been provided with the data using computationally intensive image recovery with the latest multiframe blind deconvolution technique, which is widely accepted in solar imaging. The presented dataset will be extended in the next few years as new image sequences are routinely acquired each sunny day at the SUTO-Solar station.

From Nobeyama Radio Observatory to the international project ALMA -Evolution of millimeter and submillimeter wave astronomy in Japan.

The establishment of the Nobeyama Radio Observatory (NRO) in 1982 was an important event that greatly influenced the subsequent development of Japanese astronomy. The 45 m radio telescope and the Nobeyama Millimeter Array (NMA) pushed Japanese radio astronomy to the forefront of the world. As a plan beyond the Nobeyama telescopes, the Japanese radio astronomy community considered a large array to achieve unprecedented resolution at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths under the project name of the Large Millimeter and Submillimeter Array (LMSA). After long and patient discussions and negotiations with the United States and Europe, the LMSA plan eventually led to the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) as an international joint project, and the ALMA was inaugurated in 2013. This paper reviews the process from the establishment of the NRO to the realization of the ALMA, including planning of the LMSA, international negotiations, site survey, instrumental developments, and initial science results.

Data-Rich Spatial Profiling of Cancer Tissue: Astronomy Informs Pathology.

Astronomy was among the first disciplines to embrace Big Data and use it to characterize spatial relationships between stars and galaxies. Today, medicine, in particular pathology, has similar needs with regard to characterizing the spatial relationships between cells, with an emphasis on understanding the organization of the tumor microenvironment. In this article, we chronicle the emergence of data-intensive science through the development of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and describe how analysis patterns and approaches similarly apply to multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) pathology image exploration. The lessons learned from astronomy are detailed, and the new AstroPath platform that capitalizes on these learnings is described. AstroPath is being used to generate and display tumor-immune maps that can be used for mIF immuno-oncology biomarker development. The development of AstroPath as an open resource for visualizing and analyzing large-scale spatially resolved mIF datasets is underway, akin to how publicly available maps of the sky have been used by astronomers and citizen scientists alike. Associated technical, academic, and funding considerations, as well as extended future development for inclusion of spatial transcriptomics and application of artificial intelligence, are also addressed.

Serial Endosymbiosis Theory: From biology to astronomy and back to the origin of life.

Serial Endosymbiosis Theory, or SET, was conceived and developed by Lynn Margulis, to explain the greatest discontinuity in the history of life, the origin of eukaryotic cells. Some predictions of SET, namely the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts, withstood the test of the most recent evidence from a variety of disciplines including phylogenetics, biochemistry, and cell biology. Even though some other predictions fared less well, SET remains a seminal theory in biology. In this paper, I focus on two aspects of SET. First, using the concept of "universal symbiogenesis", developed by Freeman Dyson to search for commonalities in astronomy and biology, I propose that SET can be extended beyond eukaryogenesis. The extension refers to the possibility that even prokaryotic organisms, themselves subject to the process of symbiogenesis in SET, could have emerged symbiotically. Second, I contrast a recent "viral eukaryogenesis" hypothesis, according to which the nucleus evolved from a complex DNA virus, with a view closer to SET, according to which the nucleus evolved through the interplay of the archaeal host, the eubacterial symbiont, and a non-LTR transposon, or telomerase. Viruses joined in later, through the process of viral endogenization, to shape eukaryotic chromosomes in the process of karyotype evolution. These two proposals based on SET are a testament to its longevity as a scientific theory.

A cosmic virosphere.

The concept of a cosmic virosphere that serves as the repository of information for all life on Earth and throughout the Universe is discussed. Recent studies in geology, astronomy and biology point to an intimate connection between the evolution of life and a cosmic virosphere/biosphere.

A half century of infrared astronomy - A personal recollection of the footprints in Japan.

Since the new era of infrared astronomy was opened by the Two Micron Sky Survey by Neugebauer et al. in the early 1960s, about a half century has passed. During this time, observations have expanded rapidly and widely, to almost every field of astronomy, to reveal new perspectives on the universe. As a result, infrared astronomy has become one of the major branches of astronomy, along with optical, radio, X-ray as well as high-energy particle astronomy. In Japan, we started our infrared astronomical activities at a rather early time, under relatively poor technical and environmental conditions, and using somewhat unconventional methods to overcome these difficulties. Here, a brief survey is presented of developments concerning infrared astronomy during the past half century, while mainly recollecting our footprints in the stream of world activities.

La esfera terrestre en el cosmos isabelino: una aproximación a la difusión temprana del copernicanismo en Inglaterra / The terrestrial sphere in the Elizabethan cosmos: an approach to the early spread of Copernicanism in England

Este artículo presenta una lectura de los principales tratados de cosmología publicados en Inglaterra durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVI a partir del concepto de globo terráqueo. Considerando las discusiones en torno a la relación proporcional entre la tierra yel agua, se propone que los primeros autores en mencionar a Copérnico adoptaron la prueba geométrica expuesta en De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543), aunque sin citar directamente esta obra. Mientras Robert Recorde describe a grandes rasgos el argumento allí contenido, Thomas Hill reproduce textualmente la explicación del mismo ofrecida por Caspar Peucer ensus Elementa doctrinae de circulis coelestibus, et primo motu (1551). La presencia de la prueba matemática en favor del globo terráqueo, tiende a desaparecer en la medida que la teoría de la proporción décupla pierde relevancia hacia finales del siglo XVI (AU)

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Massively parallel WRNN reconstructors for spectrum recovery in astronomical photometrical surveys.

The investigation of solar-like oscillations for probing star interiors has enjoyed a tremendous growth in the last decade. Once observations are over, the most notable difficulties in properly identifying the true oscillation frequencies of stars are due to the gaps in the observation time-series and the intrinsic stellar granulation noise. This paper presents an innovative neuro-wavelet reconstructor for the missing data of photometric signals. Firstly, gathered data are transformed using wavelet operators and filters, and this operation removes granulation noise, then we predict missing data by a composite of two neural networks, which together allow a "forward and backward" reconstruction. This resulting error is greatly lower than the absolute a priori measurement error. The devised reconstruction approach gives a signal that is better suited to be Fourier transformed when compared with other existing methods.

Precise stellar surface gravities from the time scales of convectively driven brightness variations.

A significant part of the intrinsic brightness variations in cool stars of low and intermediate mass arises from surface convection (seen as granulation) and acoustic oscillations (p-mode pulsations). The characteristics of these phenomena are largely determined by the stars' surface gravity (g). Detailed photometric measurements of either signal can yield an accurate value of g. However, even with ultraprecise photometry from NASA's Kepler mission, many stars are too faint for current methods or only moderate accuracy can be achieved in a limited range of stellar evolutionary stages. This means that many of the stars in the Kepler sample, including exoplanet hosts, are not sufficiently characterized to fully describe the sample and exoplanet properties. We present a novel way to measure surface gravities with accuracies of about 4%. Our technique exploits the tight relation between g and the characteristic time scale of the combined granulation and p-mode oscillation signal. It is applicable to all stars with a convective envelope, including active stars. It can measure g in stars for which no other analysis is now possible. Because it depends on the time scale (and no other properties) of the signal, our technique is largely independent of the type of measurement (for example, photometry or radial velocity measurements) and the calibration of the instrumentation used. However, the oscillation signal must be temporally resolved; thus, it cannot be applied to dwarf stars observed by Kepler in its long-cadence mode.