Translator: Panagiota Prokopi Reviewer: Kevin Álvarez
For the first time in history,
a Greek discovery of a supernova explosion
has taken place and, what’s more, by a team within Greece.
It took a group of several people
working hard for 14 consecutive years,
and indeed without having the appropriate academic knowledge,
in order to be the first in the world to discover
one of the most violent events that may occur in the universe
and, thereby, contribute to the volume of related knowledge,
and also show the world that everything is possible,
even in a country that needs a change in the traditional way of thinking
more than ever before.
We have been travelling for many years among the stars
seeking to discover our roots.
What we finally found is that,
all of us
are made of stardust
and that today
we are the living beings of the universe
with consciousness.
As you know, for creation and evolution to take place,
we need the raw materials
we are made of;
for us earthly beings
such materials can be found in the most unlikely places.
Out there, in the universe,
certain stars, large stars, much larger than our sun,
die in the most brilliant, luminous manner
in the so-called supernova explosions.
Yet, this process, in a split second,
produces all chemical elements heavier than iron
and necessary for the existence of life.
Imagine that the universe is a chef,
a cosmic chef,
who puts all necessary ingredients
into a big oven
to develop his own recipe.
To us, this recipe is the recipe of life, of our very own life.
As you know,
our sun is a 3rd generation star.
This means that in this part of the galaxy,
prior to the formation of our sun,
there had been two other massive stars,
that exhausted their fuel very quickly
and each of them, successively, caused a supernova explosion.
This is how the material we are made of was created.
Without those deaths
we wouldn’t be here today sharing our ideas.
That’s why, every night,
on a roof deck, not far from this hall,
there are two automatic telescopes
scanning the sky on every clear night
for signs of distant galaxies
so that we can later optically analyse these images
and detect changes
either in galactic cores,
which glow more intensely after an explosion,
or in the spirals
created when a new spot
that seems to be stellar appears.
All this effort is made
in order to answer the big questions of life
in our own way, if you like.
Why are we here?
Where are we? When are we?
I have also been asking myself such questions since I was a kid.
I remember that while seeking for answers,
no one could provide sufficient explanations,
at least no one within my social milieu.
Along the way, as I kept looking for answers,
I found out that in our country at that time -
I am talking about 1999 -
delving in astronomy was considered a bit odd or even weird.
Since then, however, thanks to a series of extremely successful actions
undertaken by various people
of the Greek Astronomy community around the country,
public opinion has significantly improved in favour of astronomy,
whether as a science or a hobby.
So, in 1999, when I was called up for my national military service
I started dreaming and thinking
of how I would organise my own research on supernovas.
Not much information was available back then;
nevertheless, I was going to find my personal path one way or another.
So, during the 5-day leave of absence usually granted for Easter,
I built an elementary version of an observatory.
Right after my discharge
I took out a bank loan to buy my first telescope.
I was well aware that the whole affair was going to cost a lot of money
and that it would be complex and difficult.
What I could never have imagined was the lack of knowledge
I would be discovering in the course
of trying to make an array that would work.
Such lack of knowledge at that time
was beneficial for me,
however, because I didn’t have a negative attitude:
it hadn’t occurred to me that it would be beyond my reach.
And so, I started little by little,
acquiring knowledge and studying
and after a great, great, great deal of trouble and effort
I managed to have a system that worked.
That whetted my appetite, if you like,
to make it even better.
So, today the observatory, along with the telescopes,
works automatically.
I don’t call it “robotic”, because there is a difference.
This machinery is working on its own
and is capable of deciding when to search,
where to search and how to search all year round.
What the irony here is, of course, that as soon as one problem is solved,
another one is created.
I first wanted to build an automatic observatory,
so that I might be able to sleep at night,
while it kept working.
What I found out then was that the data generated were of such a large scale
that I couldn’t analyse it,
so the same old story started again.
At that time I came up against an insurmountable ''wall'',
because I lacked the technical knowledge
and there were no tools available to try anything else.
Fortunately for me, a solution emerged,
when between 2003 and 2004
the first high speed DSL
Internet circuits were introduced into Greece;
and not only that.
We were able to have a home computer connected on line uninterruptedly.
This immediately gave me the idea
to try to contact members of
Thessaloniki Astronomy Friends’ Club
in order to see whether they would be interested
and willing to get involved in the research.
I was delighted to see the will was there and each and every one of the club members
was both willing and interested in contributing to the visual, if you like,
expansion of galaxy investigation.
However, at that very point in time,
I had to ponder my own selfishness,
because my wish had been to be the first Greek to make
a supernova discovery through this effort,
through a team,
even if somebody else
might be able to spot such an explosion.
Weighing my ego against our common effort,
I realised or, if you prefer,
I saw that working with a group of people
could prove more efficient in the future.
This is how I finally created the Greek Supernova Surveillance Team
and the news spread rapidly throughout the country.
Soon, people from as far away as the island of Crete and the River Evros
and Greeks living abroad had joined our team.
It was as simple as that.
Our team has continued to develop,
because I did not even know what the meaning of crowd-sourcing was.
What happened, happened simply because of the need to deliver some result.
Finally, with the advent of cloud computing,
the cloud,
we all have our computers constantly synchronized
with the observatory’s server
and so we can proceed with image detailed investigation
even when images are produced by the telescopes at night-time.
Another concurrent technological advance has also been quite beneficial to us,
namely social media and, in particular, Facebook,
which have enabled direct communication among members,
since whatever one wishes to say at any given moment,
can be seen by everyone else immediately, even using a smartphone.
And that is how Stavros Kioukioglou,
who spotted the first explosion,
announced it on Facebook in the post you see here;
“these images seen in this galaxy …confirm now.”
When I saw it, I knew - because Stavros has been quite thorough and methodical -
that we had something.
But when I came home from work,
I started trying to find out what was happening.
I first had to check whether what the researcher had seen
was true and celestial rather than an artifact.
Next, a very long procedure followed
until we were certain that we had discovered
a supernova that hadn’t been discovered by another group.
The competition is really intense,
on a global level,
at any stage of the research project
especially in the field of supernovas
So, we had to be absolutely certain
before announcing anything to the Astronomy community
that what we had found had not been discovered by anyone else.
Finally, 15 hours later - this is the supernova you see -
15 hours later,
and having received remarks from other observatories,
such as the telescopes from the island of Skiathos, Athens and Spain,
we were certain that we had a genuine discovery.
We had discovered a supernova and I had to report this
to the Astronomy community immediately.
Yet, we needed to be certain about it.
And then Archimede's ''eureka'' came to my mind
and, consequently, I posted, in my turn, if you look, on our team’s website:
[EYREKAMEN]
We had, indeed, discovered a new supernova
and we were now waiting for a major observatory -
that is why the international Astronomy community has to be informed -
to turn their instrument towards the explosion and measure two things:
the distance at which the explosion occurred
and it's chemical composition.
In fact, three days later
Italy’s greatest observatory,
that of Padova,
informed us that what we had discovered was indeed a supernova.
They knew it from the chemical composition
and the fact that it had occurred 280 light years away.
Just think that light had to travel through the years
at a speed of 300,000 kilometers per second
to reach the Earth
so that we would be able to record the phenomenon and see it.
For us this was an apocalyptic moment.
Yes, a dream had indeed come true. But it wasn’t just that.
Being present
at the moment the universe is creating
and being you or the team or the person observing
it had left us breathless.
Although we were imagining - because we had been researching for many years -
what that day might be like, what we would see and so on and so forth,
the most important part of it was
that we had finally witnessed the creation of the universe.
And for this reason
it was worth doing what we had been doing, i.e.
spend our time on astronomy.
We are amateurs
and we are not interested in using the final outcome.
We don't make a living out of it. We won’t make any profit from it.
What we are interested in is to be able to enjoy the ride,
to love participating in this journey.
What I have personally learned to be important was that:
it is really important to follow a path,
which keeps going,
albeit it's a complex one,
since you are still aware that this path will take you forward,
will help you develop
and will help you progress.
It is sufficient for us
to be able to look up at the starry sky,
and, much more, to be able to do something like this,
to witness such a cosmic event.
What I can tell you
is that someone’s engagement in astronomy
can provide profound knowledge
to a man;
it can even change one’s character
and it is one of the few certain things that, to my mind, it can tell us:
it can tell anyone here on Earth or beyond Earth,
where they are and when they are.
Moreover, that journey has shown me that a problem
can be broken down into smaller parts
allocated to a group of people or machines,
the so-called crowd-sourcing,
so that complex problems can be solved.
We are living at the age of big data.
Our machines generate many more data
than our computers are capable of analysing
so as to make sense of them.
The first such effort that started many years ago
had to do with another Astronomy issue,
that of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,
SETI@Home,
when scientists used the Internet
to send data to home computers
and then run signal analysis.
I believe that these are amazing times on Earth;
we are living at the age of information technology,
when I observe a high increase
at the rate the horizons of human intelligence are expanding.
This will soon take us far away from the Earth.
And it won’t be robots that will do this; it will be humans.
Finally, my vision for our team
is to be able to make the galaxy comparison procedure even simpler,
so that indeed anyone
from anywhere on the planet
without the need of login-in or becoming a member of a team,
just by oppening a tab,
and start searching for a supernova.
I honestly want other people to experience the feeling
of belonging to something greater
than a single person;
something that goes far beyond us,
even if later on they leave the group.
I believe one would then have gained something for the rest of their lives;
this is the experience.
If there is one thing I may say from the bottom of my heart,
it is that we are born to be travellers,
researchers and pioneers.
And we are called upon to do that in a world on the move.
It is not only the world that is on the move,
but the whole universe and we are on the move along with it.
Thank you.
(Applause)