Area students turn eyes to the sky

By KIRK SWAUGER
The Tribune-Democrat

ROCKWOOD August 25, 2008 11:35 pm

— Alex Waldron and Lazar LaLone are looking to the night sky.
The two Rockwood Area School District students have finished training at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, W.Va., to help astronomers search for new pulsars.
“Once you find one,” said LaLone, a sophomore, “you get pretty excited. Looking at the data on page after page is pretty intense. There’s a lot of things that aren’t pulsars.”
Pulsars are dense neutron stars, the corpses of massive stars that have exploded, the observatory said.
As the stars spin, radio waves stream through space and can be captured by radio telescopes as they pass the Earth.
Spearheaded by physics teacher Kurt Woolslayer, Rockwood is the only school district in the state to participate in the partnership between the observatory and West Virginia University.
Rockwood has received a three-year grant through the National Science Foundation for the initiative.
LaLone and Waldron were trained as team leaders during a weeklong session last month, Woolslayer said.
The two will work with other interested students in the district to analyze data from the giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope.
“The kids will have a chance to do real-world science, real-world research,” Woolslayer said.
An estimated 60 teachers and 600 students from West Virginia and states as far away as Texas are participating in the program.
During the school year, teams will share information online through a site operated by Northwestern University. Participants will present their results at a scientific seminar at West Virginia University in the spring.
“The students in this program are partners in frontier research, discovering new pulsars and measuring changes in pulsars already known,” said Sue Ann Heatherly, education officer for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Heatherly said the data produced by the telescope, which will be analyzed by multiple teams, is expected to reveal dozens of previously unknown pulsars.
“This means that every student in the project is virtually guaranteed to discover or confirm a new pulsar,” she said.
LaLone and Waldron said they have always been interested in astronomy. While in West Virginia, they got to experience what even some veteran astronomers have to wait years to accomplish.
“They gave us seven hours on the telescope,” Waldron said.
Woolslayer said the initiative will help to train future scientists as almost all government engineers are projected to retire within five years.
“The federal government hasn’t put much money into math education since Sputnik,” he said of the Russian satellite launched more than four decades ago.
If the two remain in the program, they have an opportunity to receive a scholarship to the University of Texas at Brownsville or other schools.
“I think it’s a great opportunity for them,” said Lane LaLone, Lazar’s father. “It’s fantastic.”