Abstract Details
| Name: Ananda Hota Affiliation: UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences Conference ID: ASI2015_378 Title : Progress report on RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory, India (#RADathomeindia #ABCDresearch) Authors and Co-Authors : RAD@home Collaboration Abstract Type : Poster Abstract Category : Other Abstract : As noted by Marshall, Lintott & Fletcher (2015, ARAA vol. 53), RAD@home is a “'a zero-funded, zero-infrastructure, human-resource network' using free web services and public astronomical data archives (using existing infrastructure) to organise and enable citizen astronomy research." A progress report on this first Indian citizen-science project will be presented. It has been spreading fast all over India (on average, two new member joining everyday). With 1150 members, it is the largest Indian astronomical group/page/profile in Facebook. It is powered by S3N3_India network, which has been funded by DST, Govt. of India. S3N3 has 5500 subscribers and can reach 40,000 people. for a single news Joining RAD@home is just a click away and absolutely free. Any BSc/BE student/qualified-person, employed/unemployed, Indian can join https://www.facebook.com/groups/RADathome/ . Sseveral thousands of multi-wavelength (UV to radio) galaxy images have been uploaded and analysed in Facebook. Nearly 40 Indians were selected and trained in one-week (~70 hrs) RAD@home Discovery camps, held in institutes like CBS (Mumbai), IOP (Bhubaneswar), HRI (Allahabad) and Nehru planetarium in Delhi (22-28 Dec 2014) with free local hospitality. Discoveries made by the camp participants, from TGSS-data, gets documented in Google-docs. These documents they co-author, makes these resource-poor people rich with intellectual property. They become Co-I in GTAC proposals and co-author in national/international papers (http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014arXiv1402.3674H). Thus, students get boost in their career for selection to winter/summer schools and PhD fellowships. Participants continue to discover from home and will be new workforce to tackle BIG DATA problem and needs of uGMRT, TMT, SKA, ASTROSAT, DOT etc. I will briefly report data analyses done from the project GOOD-RAC (GMRT Observation of Objects Discovered by RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory, India). GOOD-RAC-1 and -2 focused on episodic radio galaxies and diffuse C-shaped radio emission in clusters, respectively. The hunt for galaxy filaments has also been progressing well and a poster paper on this was selected and presented in a meeting on cosmology in ICTP, Italy. I will also summarise the earlier project, hunt for Speca-2. By now, four speca-like galaxies have been published and possibly a dozen, if results from RAD@home and radio galaxy zoo projects are combined, have been tentatively identified by citizen-scientists. New analysis of Speca and similar galaxies done with the GMRT, HCT, XMM-Newton and Subaru will be presented. I will argue how RAD can not be replaced by automation and will always assist professionals. RAD@home has been contineously redefining itself as a scalable model of education-research-and-media aiming to alleviate socio-economic and geo-political constraints on the faster, inclusive, and sustainable growth of the nation. |