User:Wyatt Tyrone Smith/TanaJoseph

Tana Dale Joseph is an outreach astronomer at the South African Astronomical Observatory. She is currently on a Newton Fellowship at Manchester University's School of Physics and Astronomy.

Education and career
At age 11 Joseph saw pictures of the Hubble Space Telescope published in the Cape Times and decided that she wanted to be an astronomer. She completed a BSc in Physics and MSc in Astronomy at the University of Cape Town. In 2009 she went to the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom where she completed her PhD in High Energy Astrophysics in 2013. During 2011, Joseph spent six months in Boston at the Harvard–Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

During the time that she was writing her thesis, she spent several months at Texas Tech University where she worked with Tom Maccarone. They had worked together previously while she was a graduate student at University of Southampton. Joseph then worked as a Fellow of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) from 2013 to 2016 while at the University of Cape Town. In April 2016, she was interviewed as the first woman of colour to be awarded a postdoctoral SKA fellowship.

In 2016 she moved to the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). Her research at the SAAO covers black holes and neutron stars. As outreach astronomer of the SAAO (a position created for her to allow her to pursue her research and increase public understanding of astronomy) she interacted with the public by replying to emails on astronomy-related topics; giving talks at schools; and acting as social media coordinator. She returned to the Texas Tech University (TTU) as a Fulbright scholar in 2017, where she again worked with Tom Maccarone. Her research focused on black holes and neutron stars in nearby galaxies and specifically a particular black hole that Maccarone had discovered in 2007. Her project while at TTU was entitled, "A Multi-Wavelength Study of X-ray Binaries in the Local Universe." Her research area was low mass X-ray binary systems (LMXBs) and, in particular, a search for black hole binary systems in the globular clusters of the Virgo and Fornax Clusters as well as LMXBs in the Magellanic Clouds.

In 2017 she presented at the 29th International Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics.

In March 2018, she left the SAAO and went to the University of Manchester, England on an Issac Newton Fellowship which will last until March 2020. Joseph will present the Lovell Lecture at the Jodrell Bank discovery Centre on 28 March 2019 and will be appearing as part of a panel discussion on the "different messengers from deep space" in July 2019 that is being held at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics.

Newton Fellowship Research
Joseph is conducting research at the University of Manchester as part of the Newton International Fellowship. The team is searching for neutron stars and black holes in two galaxies that are close enough that they are visible to the naked eye. These objects are spinning and accreting matter from nearby stars while emitting radiation ranging from high energy X-rays to radio waves that can be detected by both ground- and space-based telescopes, such as MeerKAT. Studying these objects will improve our knowledge of galactic, stellar and planetary formation.

Project Thunderkat
Joseph is part of the team of researchers working on project THUNDERKAT, in the relativistic accretion working group. THUNDERKAT is an acronym for The HUNt for Dynamic and Explosive Radio transients with MeerKAT and is part of the large survey project (LSP) domain on MeerKAT. MeerKAT is a precursor radio telescope to the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and is operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO). After a review in 2016 four components of the MeerKAT large survey projects (namely X-ray binaries, Cataclysmic Variables, short Gamma-Ray Bursts and Supernovae type Ia) were approved for scheduling between 2018 and 2022. The MeerKAT LSP data will be searched, in real-time, for synchrotron radio transients increasing the chance of discovering rare radio transients by a factor of 10. The associated MeerLICHT project (opened in May 2018) will provide concurrent optical data.

Selected publications

 * A deeper look at the X-ray point source population of NGC 4472, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2017)
 * NIBLES: an H I census of stellar mass selected SDSS galaxies. I. The Nançay H I survey, Astronomy & Astrophysics (2016)
 * Deep Chandra observations of the NGC 4472 globular cluster black hole XMMU 122939.7+075333: short-term variability from the first globular cluster black hole binary, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2015)
 * The Absence of Radio Emission from the Globular Cluster G1, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2012)
 * The unusual radio transient in M82: an SS 433 analogue?, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2011)
 * A Variable Black Hole X-ray Source in an NGC 1399 Globular Cluster, The Astrophysical Journal (2010)

In 2009, Joseph contributed to a Physics textbook used in South Africa, The United States of America and the United Kingdom.

Personal life
Tana Joseph is active on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. In 2015, she completed the 10 km Peace Run for the Children's Hospital Trust South Africa as part of the Sanlam Cape Town marathon, thereby raising R3,000 for charity.