Young Astronomers Reveal the Universe

In the film Deep Impact a teenager discovers a comet with a small telescope. This is unlikely because comet-hunters with larger telescopes would have found it long before the young hero. However young people often make astronomical discoveries and here are some of them.

The green comet

A little boy in China spotted Comet Hale-Bopp in a telescope. He was disappointed to learn that he hadn't discovered the comet and was determined to find one of his own one day. Seven years later, when Quanzhi Ye was a student at Sun Yat-Sen University, he found his comet. Not in a small telescope, but in photographs taken by an astronomer at Lulin Observatory in Taiwan. Comet Lulin was notable for its green color. Click here to see Jack Newton's photograph.

Big telescopes don't have eye pieces

People used to make discoveries by pointing their telescopes skyward and looking. When astrophotography was invented large telescopes could take pictures of big areas of sky for later analysis. American astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (1868-1921) discovered 2400 variable stars on photographic plates.

Today, instead of plates, cameras use CCDs to collect and store information electronically. Big telescopes don't have eyepieces. Astronomers monitor them from a control room or simply request images from distant robotic telescopes.

In Wales the University of Glamorgan's Faulkes Telescope Project has access to two robotic telescopes, one in Hawaii and one in Australia. They are used mainly for educational purposes, so schools can initiate and contribute to genuine research.

Asteroid Hannablyth?

Welsh schoolgirl Hannah Blyth got a summer work experience placement at the University of Glamorgan in 2011. She worked with professional astronomers hunting for asteroids. Along with the rest of the team, Hannah used the robotic telescopes.

Altogether the team discovered 22 asteroids. Two of them were Hannah's and if they're confirmed by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of them should be named after her.

1,300 asteroids!

Five University of Washington freshmen and sophomores carried out a research project. The original idea was to look for supernovae (massive stellar explosions). But since they kept seeing asteroids, they sensibly decided to look at these instead. Their results were announced in 2007 as they submitted 1,300 previously-unknown asteroids to the Minor Planet Center.

The group had no telescope, but used freely-available data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Since 2000 the SDSS has had a dedicated 2.5-meter telescope in New Mexico systematically imaging the sky.

The youngest supernova discoverer

In 2008 Caroline Moore had more luck finding a supernova than the students in Washington. She lives in New York state and her father is a keen amateur astronomer who built an observatory in the back yard. He also gave Caroline her first telescope when she was ten. She was a member of the Puckett Observatory Supernova Search, an international group of volunteers studying images from a network of robotic telescopes.

In order to find supernovae you need to compare pictures of the same area of sky taken at different times. You're looking for an object that appears in one, but not the other. Software lets you do this on the computer. Click here to see how the software blinks between pictures. If you look closely at David Lane's images, you should be able to pick out an object that's only in one of them.

Then 10-year-old Kathryn discovered one

Caroline was the youngest person ever to discover a supernova. But not for long, because her discovery helped inspire young Canadian Kathryn Aurora Gray to search for supernovae.

Like Caroline's father, Kathryn's father is an experienced amateur astronomer. Paul Gray had himself discovered six supernovae. He showed Kathryn how to do the search, and a friend with his own observatory sent some pictures. Kathryn found a likely supernova which was then confirmed by other astronomers. The discovery was reported at the beginning of 2011 in the names of David Lane (who took the pictures), Paul Gray and Kathryn Gray.

Pulsar search

Not all astronomy is done with images. Radio telescopes produce “plots.” Here is one from the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia. Green Bank runs a pulsar search project with schools, teaching students how to recognize unusual signals and to spot human radio interference in the data. A pulsar is a collapsed remnant of a massive star that ended its life as a supernova. It rotates very rapidly, sending out pulses that radio telescopes can detect.

Lucas Bolyard, a high school sophomore, found a rare object called a “rotating radio transient,” which is similar to a pulsar, but only gives out a radio burst every now and again. Lucas was reportedly very pleased with his discovery, but still thinks he'd like to be a doctor.

These stories are news because they're uncommon. Yet they're not as uncommon as you might think, for I found many more stories than I could possibly use in this article. Let's give Caroline Moore the last word. She said of her discovery, "I think this will motivate other kids to do anything they want. Not just astronomy."

References:

(1) http://www.universetoday.com/82152/10-year-old-girl-discovers-a-supernova/
(2) http://www.faulkes-telescope.com/news/2406
(3) http://www.space.com/4449-astronomy-students-find-1-300-asteroids.html
(4) http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2009/pulsarstudent/
(5) http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/04feb_greencomet/
(6) http://news.glam.ac.uk/news/en/2011/aug/31/work-experience-student-discovers-comet/