Gazing at the sky was required this summer for a number of Union students and visitors from other colleges who used the world's largest telescope to search for hidden galaxies and galaxy interactions.
The group operated the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico from computers in Room N304 of Science & Engineering via a remote observation system.
“Students controlled the telescope through an Internet connection,” said Rebecca Koopmann, associate professor of physics and astronomy. “They targeted an area of the sky with a relatively high density of galaxies to search for evidence that the galaxies are interacting with one another.”
Koopmann is the recipient of an NSF grant that funded a two-day ALFALFA (Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA) Undergraduate Workshop in July. (ALFA, a new detector at the Arecibo Observatory, stands for Arecibo L-Band Feed Array.)
The workshop was part of the ALFALFA survey, a large project to map one-sixth of the sky at radio wavelengths appropriate for the detection of neutral hydrogen gas in other galaxies.
The survey itself will last six years and is expected to detect as many as 20,000 galaxies as far away as 750 million light years.
“One of the main goals is to discover low mass, ‘starless' galaxies, which contain hydrogen gas but have not formed stars,” said Koopmann, who has joined with astronomers from around the world on the collaboration.
Union hosted the first ALFALFA workshop last summer.
“The NSF grant supports my involvement in the project's first two years and was specifically written to include undergraduate outreach for the project,” said Koopmann.
One of some 50 astronomers from 34 institutions in 13 countries involved in the project, she is spending this academic year on sabbatical at Cornell University, where many of the scientists are based. In conjunction with the NSF, Cornell operates the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, including the Arecibo Observatory.
On the Union campus this summer, the 26 student and faculty workshop participants included Michael Gillin '08, Bilal Mahmood '08 and Jay Read '07 (all of whom took part last year), and 10 other undergraduates and their advisors from Colgate, Cornell, Lafayette, Rochester Institute of Technology, St. Lawrence, Skidmore, Wellesley and Wesleyan.
“Modern astronomical projects involve large collaborations, which is something we wanted our students to experience,” Koopmann said. “The remote observing is collaboratively planned and proposed by the students in the same way as any other professional observation at Arecibo. On top of that, it's a fun and memorable experience for the students to observe with the largest telescope in the world.”
As the largest single-aperture telescope ever constructed (the huge “dish” is 1,000 feet in diameter and 167 feet deep and covers about 20 acres), the visually striking Arecibo telescope has starred in two films – Contact and the James Bond thriller, Golden Eye.
Union students and their peers spent weeks planning their research before the actual observations took place, then jointly wrote and submitted a proposal for the observing time to Arecibo Director Robert Brown.
They continued to analyze data throughout the summer.
“It was a great opportunity to see how real scientific research is conducted,” said Mahmood, “and to work with other professionals in the field.”