High school students and teachers across the state will join astronomers on the cutting edge of science under a new program by West Virginia University and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
The Pulsar Search Collaboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), will engage West Virginia students and teachers in a massive search for new pulsars using data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope.
The NSF recently announced an $892,838 grant to the observatory and WVU to conduct the three-year program. At WVU , the project will be coordinated through the Department of Physics in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.
The new collaboratory involves astronomers Maura McLaughlin and Duncan Lorimer, who both work with the WVU Department of Physics and the observatory. The interdisciplinary project also includes WVU professor Frances Van Scoy, of the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, who will be assisting with processing and database management.
McLaughlin and Lorimer are world-renowned experts in radio pulsars and use the Green Bank Telescope regularly for their research.
This will give West Virginia high school students the chance to make groundbreaking discoveries like finding exotic pulsar binary systems, pulsars with planetary systems or pulsars spinning faster than currently thought possible,McLaughlin said.
The collaboratory combines the capabilities of WVU and the observatory to provide a unique opportunity for teachers and students to join in cutting-edge scientific research.
The students in this program will be partners in frontier research, discovering new pulsars and measuring changes in pulsars already known,said Sue Ann Heatherly, the observatory education officer in Green Bank and principal investigator in the project.
The project will involve 60 teachers and some 600 students in helping astronomers analyze data from 1,500 hours of observing time on the Green Bank Telescope. The 120 terabytes of data produced by some 70,000 individual pointings of the giant, 17-million-pound telescope are expected to reveal dozens of previously unknown pulsars.
The program will include training for teachers and student leaders at Green Bank and an annual scientific seminar at WVU where participants can present their research. During the year, participants will share information through an online collaboration site, thecollaboratory,operated by Northwestern University.
Student teams will receive parcels of data from the Green Bank Telescope and analyze the data to discover pulsars. To do so, they will need to learn to use analysis software and recognize manmade radio interference that contaminates the data. Each portion of the data will be analyzed by multiple teams.
Pulsars are superdense neutron stars, the corpses of massive stars that have exploded as supernovae. As the neutron star spins, lighthouse-like beams of radio waves, streaming from the poles of its powerful magnetic field, sweep through space. When one of these beams sweeps across the Earth, radio telescopes can capture the pulse of radio waves.
Pulsars serve as exotic laboratories for studying the physics of extreme conditions. Scientists can learn valuable new information about the physics of subatomic particles, electromagnetics and general relativity by observing pulsars and the changes they undergo over time.
The Green Bank Telescope has helped astronomers discover more than 60 pulsars over the past five years, including the fastest rotating pulsar ever found, a speedster spinning 716 times per second.
Of the 1,500 hours of Green Bank Telescope observing data in the projecttaken this past summersome 300 hours are reserved for analysis by the high school teams. This data set is expected to include many new pulsars and about 100 known pulsars.
Because multiple teams will analyze each portion of the data, every student in the project is virtually guaranteed to discover a new pulsar,Heatherly said.
The project will begin recruiting teachers in February 2008.
The observatory is a facility of the NSF operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities Inc.