茄子直播

茄子直播 astronomers to help students in West Africa reach for the stars

Margaret Ikape and Jielai Zhang will be teaching young astronomers at a summer school in Ghana
Margaret Ikape and telescope
Once a student at a summer school for young West African astronomers, 茄子直播 master's student Margaret Ikape will be returning as an instructor. She posed in the observing dome of 茄子直播's McLennan Physical Lab (photo by Geoffrey Vendeville)

Since her childhood in Nigeria, Margaret Ikape has been fascinated by space. She remembers seeing a fireball blaze across the night sky when she was 8 years old and asking her dad what it was.

His answer didn't satisfy her curiosity, triggering more questions: How far are the stars? How big are they? Why is the Earth round?

She went in search of answers to the University of Nigeria, which back then was the only university in the country to offer an undergraduate program in astronomy. She spent time in a program called  in Accra, Ghana, which was started three years ago with the help of University of Toronto's Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Today, Ikape is a master's student at U of T. She plans to return to Africa this week to introduce a new group of students to astronomy and space.

She'll be teaching undergraduate students about cosmology at the same West African summer school that she attended. 

Not everybody has the opportunity to travel for their studies, she says. 鈥淚nstead of asking them to travel to find this knowledge, I鈥檇 like to bring it to them.鈥

The idea for the summer school was born in 2012 out of conversations between 茄子直播 astronomer Michael Reid and University of Nigeria's Bonaventure Okere. The school鈥檚 goal is to help young West African scientists and astronomers realize their potential. Jielai Zhang, a PhD student at 茄子直播 whose research partly focuses on galaxy formation, is also teaching there this summer.

Ikape鈥檚 supervisor, Professor Ren茅e Hlo啪ek, who is from South Africa and did her undergraduate and master鈥檚 degrees there, says there is a need for such astronomy workshops in Africa.

鈥淢uch of astronomy is done remotely from pristine observing sites, so students can participate from around the world, but one of the big challenges faced is building capacity across a diverse range of countries in the world, especially those that can be resource-limited,鈥 she says.

Ikape says she will be teaching an introductory course, covering the Big Bang theory and the evidence for it like the cosmic microwave background鈥揺lectromagnetic radiation left over from the event 13.8 billion years ago.

At 茄子直播, she鈥檚 working on a project related to how the first stars ionized the universe and how the state-of-the-art Simons Observatory, to be built in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, will help illuminate the origins of the universe.

鈥淭here is so much we don't even know about,鈥 she says.

鈥淚t's one of those things that drives me 鈥 I want to know what is out there and how everything started.鈥

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