Nathan Sibert, Paige Lettow, Liam Swick, Riley Hamilton, and Evan Anthopolous construct an LWA antenna. Courtesy | Facebook
Students from the college’s physics department traveled to New Mexico earlier this month to help build a new station of the Long Wavelength Array, a telescope that collects radio wave data from celestial bodies.
In collaboration with physics students from the University of New Mexico, students placed metal grates, constructed scaffolds, and positioned sensors for new antennas at the LWA’s third station.
Timothy Dolch, associate professor of physics, led the trip as a part of his new class in Signal Processing, which is an introduction to using radio astronomy instrumentation and analyzing the signals they receive.
“I had worked on the LWA the last three summers, starting from when I was on sabbatical, and it’s almost there, but the more student involvement you can get the better. During the trip, we got a lot done,” Dolch said. “We added 13 antennas and it certainly helps that group there at UNM. And everyone had fun.”
Once the third station is completed, the LWA will be able to produce higher resolution images of one of the most poorly studied parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Because the LWA is a telescope that takes in radio waves and not visible light, it has no need for a cylindrical body and a lens like an optical telescope. Instead, the LWA is composed of more than 250 Christmas tree-shaped antennas close to five feet tall, dispersed across a large patch of land. The antennas detect radio waves emitted from objects in space and send the data to a computer, which compiles it into plots and a visible image.
One of the most significant of its findings was discovering that meteors emit radio waves called Meter Radio Afterglows, according to Dolch. Using the LWA, scientists started seeing streaks in the sky and realized they were meteors.
“This was unexpected, because you think of meteors as just thermal, but the presence of radio emission means there are radio waves from high-energy plasma in the charged part of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, which is very exciting,” Dolch said. “The physics of this is not entirely understood.”
Hillsdale College owns a smaller, 13-antenna version of the LWA called the Low-Frequency All-Sky Monitor, which the Signal Processing and other physics students use to gather their own astronomical radio frequency data.
Sophomore Paige Lettow constructed five of the antennas at the LWA.
“Now I can say I’ve done something hands-on in the field,” Lettow said. “It’s one thing to analyze data that everyone has access to, and it’s another thing to go to a place that takes that data and actually contribute and make an impact in that area.”
Sophomore Joe Petullo, who went on the trip, said he appreciated contributing to a big astronomy project.
“To have a small part in constructing the LWA feels really good,” Petullo said. “This will be actively taking data and hopefully producing some unique science. It’s very gratifying to be a part of that and to say, ‘yeah, I helped to build a few antennas on that site.’”
Lettow said students working on the LWA had to learn on the job.
“We had an instruction manual that we read ahead of time, but it was hard to visualize what was going on,” Lettow said. “There was a lot of looking at the pieces, seeing the built antenna and how they fit together and thinking, ‘Oh, this is how this fits together.’”
Petullo said that one of his favorite parts of the trip was seeing the clear night skies of New Mexico.
“There were billions of stars,” Petullo said. “It was a fantastic experience for me, because I’ve never seen the plane of the galaxy with my own eyes. The trip was a transformative experience.”
