Major breakthroughs in astronomy aren't only reserved for professional
scientists, as proven by a high school student who recently helped discover a
new astronomical object.
In March 2009, West Virginia student Lucas Bolyard came
across the signature of the object while working on a project that trains
students to help analyze astronomical data. He passed the interesting signal on
to supervising astronomers, who determined it was probably a rare object known
as a rotating
radio transient.
These strange neutron
stars (extremely dense stars made up almost entirely of the subatomic
particles neutrons) emit sporadic bursts of radio waves. There are only
about 30 rotating radio transients known.
At the time of the discovery, Bolyard, a sophomore at South
Harrison High School in Clarksburg, W. Va., had already waded through more than
2,000 data plots and found nothing. He was sorting through images from the giant
Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in Green Bank as part of the Pulsar
Search Collaboratory, a joint project of the National Radio Astronomy
Observatory (NRAO) and West Virginia University, funded by a grant from the
National Science Foundation.
"I was home on a weekend and had nothing to do, so I
decided to look at some more plots from the GBT," he said. "I saw a
plot with a pulse, but there was a lot of radio interference, too. The pulse
almost got dismissed as interference."
He reported the pulse as an anomaly worth further
investigation, and it went on a list of candidates for West Virginia University
astronomers Maura McLaughlin and Duncan Lorimer to reexamine.
When the astronomers took follow-up observations, they found
nothing in the spot where the pulse came from. This proved that it was not a normal
pulsar, which is a type of neutron that rotates, emitting a continuous
lighthouse beam of light.
In July 2009, the scientists confirmed that the original
pulse signal was real, and not interference, by reprocessing the raw data. This
indicated that the strange object was probably a rare rotating radio transient.
At the time, Bolyard was at the observatory with fellow
students. They had been observing on the GBT all night and were exhausted. But
when Lorimer showed Bolyard the new plot of his pulse showing that it was a
real signal, Bolyard didn't feel tired anymore.
"That news made me full of energy," he said.
Rotating radio transients are thought to be similar to regular
pulsars, but they emit intermittently, one burst a time, instead of
continuously. This characteristic makes them hard to find - the first one was
discovered in 2006.
"These objects are very interesting, both by themselves
and for what they tell us about neutron stars and supernovae," McLaughlin
said. "We don't know what makes them different from pulsars - why they
turn on and off. If we answer that question, it's likely to tell us something
new about the environments of pulsars and how their radio waves are generated."
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