Episode 9 - Star Hunters

[Walking sounds.]  

DIANA MAZZELLA: It’s dark. It’s the kind of dark found in places where you have a neighbor who lives miles away. On a clear night, the sky has more than one shade of black and you can see the stars that are just barely visible.

It’s quiet here.

Except for the sound of my footfalls and some kids talking as they head in for the night.

There are a lot of rules here. With good reason.

I walk past the gate that marks the line of what is allowed outside and what is not allowed inside. No digital cameras. No cell phones. No cars that aren’t diesel-powered. There is no cell service in the area. I’m kicking myself for not bringing a flashlight and I find my way by keeping to the asphalt road. But my sacrifice is for science, and besides, I’m almost there.

By this point, I’m a few hundred feet from the Green Bank Telescope within the Monongahela National Forest of West Virginia. All you can see of the 328-foot form of the telescope is the red lights at the top to warn aircraft. The rest is just an absence of stars.

But I’m looking for a much smaller telescope along the road, the third one on the left. It’s 40 feet tall. I can see light coming from the door. And I’m hoping to hear the voices of teenagers.

When I open the door, the group named Team Taylor is trying to use what remains of their 30 minutes to search for galactic hydrogen.  

TEEN VOICES: Let’s say whenever this reaches 30 seconds, OK? 10 seconds and then I’ll start the metronome. OK. Press the first mark whenever I say start. Alrighty. [Unintelligible] Start. [metronome sounds.] Eight, nine, ten.  

MAZZELLA: I’m Diana Mazzella and this is Sparked, a podcast from West Virginia University Magazine about the people who are working for Appalachia’s future. This is part one of a series about West Virginia’s relationship to deep space.

It’s the week of the Fourth of July, and about 40 high school students and a few teachers from around the country are at the Green Bank Observatory as part of a program that teaches teenagers how to search for a kind of star called a pulsar.

MAURA McLAUGHLIN: So my name is Maura McLaughlin and I am a professor in the department of physics and astronomy at WVU. I'm an astronomer. I mostly use large radio telescopes to study stars called pulsars, which are compact remnants of massive stars that have exploded in Supernova explosions.  

So they're the most extreme state of matter that want to can actually study. So there's a ton of things we don't understand about what they're made of, the process through which they're formed.

The other reason they're interesting is that you can use them as physics laboratories. So pulsars are basically very accurate cosmic clocks. So they rotate extremely precisely, so it's like taking a very accurate atomic clock and putting it in space.

MAZZELLA: McLaughlin is a radio astronomer, which means that she uses large radio telescopes, with massive white dishes, to collect radio signals from the universe.

Scientists are seeking more pulsars as tools in their research. For McLaughlin, that means using them to examine gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime, that were predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

So pulsars are important. And it’s a good idea to get some help in finding more.

McLaughlin co-founded the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, which is hosting this week’s camp. In 2007, she and her colleague and husband Duncan Lorimer, both professors at West Virginia University, collected 300 hours of data on the Green Bank Telescope as it scanned the sky. Then with Sue Ann Heatherly at the observatory, they trained hundreds of high school students to comb through the plots to look for pulsars. At first the students were just from West Virginia, and now they come from across the country.

During the observation at Green Bank, they’re starting with a known target hydrogen to learn the process of using a radio telescope. They’re looking for galactic hydrogen, which is most often found in the plane of the Milky Way. But since it’s evening in the northern hemisphere in the summer, the largest stretch of hydrogen in the sky is hidden behind the Earth.

That night, I meet Team Bell, who happen to be named for Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the scientist who discovered Pulsars.  

First they have to move the telescope. And it takes a lot of time.

While this is happening, Anthony Jeffrey, from Huntington, West Virginia, and who wants to become a chemist, is thinking this.

ANTHONY JEFFREY: Don't break it, because if we put it below 30 degrees then it will literally run into the ground and that's a lot of money that I don't have to replace it.

Peter Decker from Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, wants to go into astrophysics and computer science. He’s thinking this:

PETER DECKER: Um, just how am I going to get this done in the maximum amount of time? It takes five minutes to pan 30 degrees. I'm not going to be able to finish all my measurements in time. I was just worried so much about it.

COLBY WINTERS:

I’m going to start right at 1525 so five seconds. [Juliette Arteaga counting] 8,9 mark. [metronome sound].

The telescope was built in 1961, so the technology is of that time with dials and buttons on giant machines that direct the telescope’s movements. The radio waves intercepted by the telescope at the set frequency are recorded on a machine that draws lines using little pens on a piece of chart paper. The team’s mentor Anika Rowe, who recently graduated from WVU with a chemistry degree, goes over the results with them.  

JEFFREY: That’s it.

ANIKA ROWE: Something weird happened. … So did we do the calibration right? When we calibrated were the drives on?  

But we should talk about this for one second. It’s not blank. What did you guys expect when we decided not to point the telescope directly at the galactic center? Did you expect to see hydrogen?

TEENS: Not a lot. Less. If there’s a star or nebula… There’s definitely hydrogen there, just not as much.

MAZZELLA: Colby Winters, who is from Boyd County, Kentucky, wants to become an astronomer or go into aerospace for NASA or somewhere like Green Bank. He is all business during the observations, but inside, he is super excited.  

WINTERS: It just was like, okay you're doing this. This is actual research, like people have done this but this is a little bit different. This is our information that we collected as a team. And that's just something that really made you think like if I could do it anybody can.  

MAZZELLA: Juliette Arteaga, is from Whittier, California, and is leaning toward a degree in biology or astrophysics. To her, just being at the telescope is awe-inspiring.

ARTEAGA: I thought it was really exciting though because already from a distance I could see though the huge Green Bank telescope I've heard and read about and also like these other telescopes surrounding it I could always see. It’s just everywhere you look there's like so much  science at work here and I think that's like the most amazing thing is actually being where it really does happen.

Sean Morton, is from Hurricane, West Virginia, and wants to go to culinary school. He loves being at the observatory and has been to the camp before.

SEAN MORTON: Of course I am rather interested in finding a pulsar, but it's not the desire to find a pulsar isn't so much what keeps me going. It is something I'm interested in and I do strive for. I think what keeps me going is my general interest in pulsars and anything related to science at all really. I found science unlike quite a few other fields is an ever-expanding area. So there's always something new to learn.

MAZZELLA: As their precious 30 minutes ticks on they seemed incredibly driven. No small talk. Instant debate about mistakes. Lots of reminders. And more reminders. And the constant knowledge that they have limited time.

And then on the last plot. This happens.  

TEEN VOICES: Press down and we’re going to...woah! We just ripped our data. Are you kidding? It’s still usable. Anyone have tape. Welcome to science where we have two tape dispensers and no tape and we have an entire building full of wires but we can’t set it so it marks itself.

MAZZELLA: In removing their new plot from the chart machine, they tore the paper. They’re in a hot room with no tape. Meh. That’s science, they say.

ROWE: All right guys, the next group is coming in so let’s wrap it up and give them the telescope.

DECKER: C’mon, you guys have three more minutes before you need to be here. What are you doing?

JEFFREY: Let’s get out of Dodge.

MAZZELLA: Team Bell goes back to the dorms to figure out what they’re going to say in the morning. New teams arrive. The poor souls with wake-up times around 5 a.m. still have to observe. They offered for me to tag along. I declined. Then all the teams gather in the science center’s auditorium.  

In the debrief for Team Bell, Colby makes the time on the telescope sound calm and orderly.

WINTERS: So our right ascension was about 1510, so we were like, OK the galaxy the plane of the galaxy will be below the horizon. Can’t see it okay. So where should we point next? We found at the lowest declination that we found that had the strongest pulse of hydrogen, but it wasn’t right at hydrogen. It was slightly blue-shifted with a higher frequency.

Heatherly is intrigued with their finding when the telescope was positioned at 0 degrees. 

HEATHERLY: They got a taller peak at zero than they got at negative 28. Huh. That is interesting to me, actually.

MAZZELLA: And she keeps coming back to it.

HEATHERLY: Because you got some weird data. Like when we were at zero over here when you said zero you got to higher spike than you did when you thought you were closer. There are high velocity clouds. There's clouds being lifted out of our galaxy and raining back down and stuff like that. You might have hit a high velocity cloud.I don't know. So excellent work everyone.

MAZZELLA: In 2009, a high school student from Clarksburg, West Virginia, was at home on a weekend on the computer. He’d looked at more than 2,000 plots of the pulsar data from the Green Bank Telescope. He looked at one more.

It was probably interference. But he sent it along anyway. When McLaughlin and others examined it, they found it wasn’t a pulsar -- it was rarer than that. It was only one of about thirty rotating radio transients that had been discovered up until that time. The transients are less predictable than pulsars: neutron stars that send out a radio pulse irregularly, with sometimes hours between each event.

Lucas was honored for his discovery at the White House.  

Now, McLaughlin brags about him to the group.  

McLAUGHLIN: Oh, by the way, Lucas is now he’s in medical school so he’s becoming a doctor. I recently heard from him. He’s married and he’s becoming a doctor and I felt really old, because he’s actually not even…

MAZZELLA: In the decade since his discovery, students in the Pulsar Search Collaboratory found seven pulsars, some at home, one particularly celebrated find during the week at Green Bank. It’s that electric possibility that permeates the camp.   

But within the exciting haze is another possibility that’s maybe less exciting right now. McLaughlin pulls up a paper from the Astrophysical Journal: the May 1, 2013 edition.

It’s titled “The Pulsar Search Collaboratory: Discovery and Timing of Five New Pulsars.” There are 71 names at the top. After the names are the places the scientists work.

Like West Virginia University.  

McGill University.

ASTRON: The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy.

Then there are about 20 locations that are different.

James River High School. Lincoln High School. Broadway High School. Pocahontas County High School. Sherando High School. Hedgesville High School. Central High School of Westosha. Strasburg High School. Independence High School. Roanoke Valley Governor’s School. Nicolet High School. Nicholas County High School. Rowan County High School. Wilmington Middle School. James W. Robinson Secondary School. Spring Valley High School. Blacksburg High School. Elkins High School. Trinity High School. Tolsia High School. George C. Marshall High School. Morgantown High School…

McLAUGLIN: What I want to point out is the names here. So these are all students. Matt and Ashley, Megan Weaver, Alex Snyder, Casey Thompson, all these students here, all these names are students, and so they’ve got on this actual astrophysical journal paper which is a pretty cool thing to do as a high school student…

MAZZELLA: So I know there’s something you’ve probably been thinking this whole time. It occurred to me, too. This camp is a great exercise. Looking for pulsars at home is exciting. But is it the same thing as “real” science? The students haven’t even graduated from high school. Some can’t legally drive. They have a curfew at this camp and have to let the instructors know when they want to go for an early-morning run.

McLaughlin is going through that paper, the one with all the high school students. And she talks about a study of the results from both students and professionals.  

McLAUGHLIN: …Part of this survey. So for this survey we took 20 percent of the data and gave it to the PSC and 80 percent and gave it to professional astronomers. The past time though two years ago, the data you’re looking at that’s all yours. There’s no astronomers also looking. It is all your data. The cool thing about this though is we analyze the accuracy of the high school students and the astronomers and they were just about equal like the PSC students did not miss anything. They found just the same ratio of pulsars as the astronomers.

MAZZELLA: Just about equal.

McLaughlin moves on to other things. I’m still stuck on “just about equal.” So if some high school students, and sometimes middle school students, can accurately analyze data and discover a star in the same way as professionals, then this camp is not about them becoming scientists. It’s about them being scientists.

After the debrief, I meet up with Team Bell. They’re waiting for Colby. He’s been looking for one of the faculty for the last day. And he’s finally gotten some time to talk with her. Colby is from Kentucky, and he’s the only student from the state at camp this summer. In the sessions, he was one of the students who asked the most questions.

When I talk to Colby, I find out that he is intensely interested in astronomy. I ask him if he can do this kind of work back home.

WINTERS: In rural Eastern Kentucky, there's very minimal resources that we actually get offered that we can use to come do things like this. Sciences and a lot of it is not looked upon. It's something that's most people like you don't need that. It's just part of the culture I guess is very overlooked and unimportant.

The reason I joined the Pulsar Search Collaboratory is thanks to one of my teachers who came and told me about it, and he was like ‘We have a school club but it's no one hears about it. No one talks about it. There's only one person in it and now, well, he graduated.’ So now me and with just nobody interested in it really.

MAZZELLA: But Colby is still taking this path because he believes that a career in science is right for him.

WINTERS: It is important and that's something that we as people really like we have that curiosity and then we think ‘Oh, that sounds hard,’ so just don't necessarily go for it, but it's definitely important for us as a society.

MAZZELLA: At the end of the group debrief, Heatherly pointed out that the ideas the students bring forward to explain their data are fairly recent. Decades ago, humans didn’t have the names for what they were looking at. They just had questions.                  

HEATHERLY: But you know if you had been here in 1955, and we had had the same discussion with this data that you have collected you'd be on your way to being a very famous astronomer because this was not even thought through not known we didn't even know hydrogen emitted radio waves until 1955.

So if you think about that, you think that's a long time ago, but in the scheme of scientific knowledge, that's not very long ago at all. So you are doing some pretty high-powered thought here and thinking about the way the Milky Way's put together. And scientists are still doing it.

MAZZELLA: Months after the campers have gone home to Pennsylvania and California and Kentucky and their towns in West Virginia, I think about the lives they live when they’re not being treated like scientists but are still doing science.

Some are in magnet programs and pulsar clubs.  

Maybe like Sean, they want to go to culinary school. Maybe like Peter, they want to be astrophysicists. They’ve definitely settled on chemistry like Anthony. Or like Juliette, they’re keeping their science options open.

Others, like Colby, are an hour away from the state science academy, with themselves and a computer. They’re the only one.

I think about when they’re alone at the computer screen. They log on to the website. And look at plot. After plot. After plot. After plot.  

Not this one. Not this one. That’s radio frequency interference. Not this one. Maybe that one? Not this one.

Until.

Thank you for listening to Sparked, a podcast of West Virginia University Magazine. This episode was recorded and produced by Raymond Thompson Jr. and me, Diana Mazzella.  

A big thank you to the Green Bank Observatory and the entire Pulsar Search Collaboratory, particularly Maura McLaughlin, Sue Ann Heatherly and Team Bell.

Help others find our podcast by rating and reviewing us on Apple Podcasts. And let us know what you thought of this episode by contacting us through our website: magazine.wvu.edu, where you can also subscribe to our newsletter. Also on the website, you can watch a really cool video Raymond made of the pulsar search collaboratory a few years ago.

Sparked is a production of West Virginia University, located in Morgantown, West Virginia.  

RAYMOND THOMPSON JR.: Tell me a story.

MAZZELLA: So there are these things that are going in the air around us every few seconds and the crazy part is that we have absolutely no idea what they are.

THOMPSON: When were the signals detected?  

MAZZELLA: So they were actually detected here at West Virginia University in 2007.

THOMPSON: You mean like literally at the University, like in the cafeteria or something or the Coliseum.

MAZZELLA: No. So the signal was recorded in Australia but then that data was looked at by a student but he brought it to his professor and the professor was like, hm, this looks different. They found this new type of signal.  

THOMPSON: New type of signal? Like a television signal? Cable signal? What do you mean, new type of signal?  

MAZZELLA: So we know that the radio waves are coming from somewhere in space. Um, but what they’re coming from is pretty unclear at this moment and that is what makes it really exciting.

THOMPSON: I thought you were going to tell me a story about a microwave. I’m lost.

MAZZELLA: So microwaves do appear in this story and it’s pretty fun in a really unexpected way. So stay tuned for our next episode.