Polish team won four silver medals and one honorable mention at the 17th International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics (IOAA) that has just concluded in Brazil. The silver medalists were Andrzej Maroń from Warsaw, Michal Jagodziński from Szczecin, Dawid Chudzik from Warsaw and Piotr Jędrzejczyk from Cracow. An honorable mention went to Krzysztof Nadulicz from Białystok.
The Olympiad was dominated by Peter Andolšek from Slovenia, who repeated his success from last year, winning the title of best competitor, including the practical part.
During this year’s Olympiad, participants faced a series of 11 theoretical tasks, which they had to solve in 5 hours. Among them were tasks related to black holes, satellite flights or galaxy clusters.
The practical part included two tasks on data analysis. In one of them, the position of the center of our galaxy had to be determined based on observations of globular clusters. The practical part also included a task in the planetarium, where participants had to demonstrate knowledge of the southern sky. In addition, they solved tasks by conducting observations with the use of Galileoscope and a sky map.
Teams at the IOAA consist not only of exceptionally talented students. Each team is also accompanied by leaders responsible for preparing the participants. The Polish representation was again supervised by astronomers from the Planetarium – Silesian Science Park: Damian Jabłeka and Waldemar Ogłoza.
