Seniors Whit Lewis and Evan Anthopoulos, sophomore Liam Swick, and junior Riley Hamilton set up the DLITE telescope in Observatory Park, Ohio, before the eclipse reaches totality.
Courtesy | Timothy Dolch
Olivia Young was starting to cry.
Although the fourth-year physics Ph.D. student from Rochester Institute of Technology had collaborated with a Hillsdale professor to study last week’s total solar eclipse for more than two years, nothing could prepare her for the sight of that wispy white halo enveloping the shadow of the moon.
“It was like nothing I have ever seen before,” Young said.
After the halo disappeared in a flash of emerging sunlight, Young turned her eyes to the website she had open, refreshed the page and watched the eclipse a second time — through the eyes of a radio telescope.
Young was not just in the path of totality to admire the eclipse. She was also there to take data on the sun’s corona, a layer of the sun’s atmosphere that is as mysterious as it is beautiful.
Over the past two years, Young collaborated with Associate Professor of Physics Timothy Dolch and several Hillsdale College students to build four Christmas-tree-like metal structures in Observatory Park, Ohio. The four antennae combine to form the Deployable Low-band Ionosphere and Transient Experiment (DLITE) telescope. It records the natural radio light emission from the sky at frequencies lower than optical light at 30-45 megahertz.
According to Young, researchers know very little about the sun’s atmosphere at these low light frequencies of radio astronomy because the atmosphere is difficult to isolate from the rest of the sun.
“You really can’t study the sun’s atmosphere very effectively in radio astronomy, because of the way that the telescopes work,” Young said. “The only time you can do it is when the sun is conveniently blotted out by something else, which would be an eclipse.”
Young and Dolch met because of their shared interest in radio astronomy. When Young heard Dolch was planning to build a radio telescope in Ohio to take data on the eclipse, she jumped at the opportunity to get involved and took a position as the principal investigator of the project.
With the data from the DLITE telescope, Young and Dolch aimed to determine where in the corona low-frequency radio emission comes from, and better understand solar radio bursts, questions that could only be answered during this rare eclipse.
“You can see the corona in optical light, but it is even bigger in radio light,” Young said. “There has not been enough research to be able to define how big it is in radio light, so that’s one of the really exciting research questions that we’re hopefully going to be able to shine a little bit of light on.”
Additionally, Young and Dolch will investigate how the ions in the earth’s atmosphere drop due to reduced sunlight.
“The Earth’s atmosphere is not as understood as you would think,” Dolch said. “The northern lights happen when the charged particles from the sun fall with magnetic field lines up to the poles and you get a lot of ionization in the earth’s atmosphere. So how exactly do these things happen? It is very hard to model and people are learning to model it better. That is why more of these DLITE stations are being built around the world.”
Dolch, Young, and several Hillsdale students have taken four trips down to Observatory Park, Ohio, this past year to build the DLITE station.
Sophomore Joe Petullo helped construct the four DLITE antennae.
“These hardware trips have been a ton of fun,” Petullo said. “I love doing hardware stuff, it is my favorite part of the project. Theory is great, but it’s nice to actually build something with your hands to see the results of that.”
According to Dolch, the design of the DLITE telescope is similar to the radio telescope owned by the college, the Low-Frequency All-Sky Monitor, but also has the ability to take higher definition images of the sky, as opposed to taking radio light spectra.
“We had both telescopes on during the eclipse so that there might be solar radio bursts in the data from both,” Dolch said.
During totality, Young saw the radio light from the sun decrease as expected, but the data will need to be analyzed further to determine the size of the corona in this frequency.
“There was a pretty significant dimming. There are a couple different things that we have to do to make sure it was actually due to the eclipse, which we think it’s going to be,” Young said.
Young, Dolch, and Hillsdale students will work on analyzing the data from the telescope for both the ionosphere and corona projects over the next few months.
Meanwhile, the DLITE telescope will continue to take data on radio frequencies from the sun and the atmosphere.
“We’re going to keep taking data because it’s not just about the eclipse. The DLITE is observing radio sources all the time, and it’s a good instrument. Things will flash that you’re not expecting in the radio sky, so we’re excited to keep using this instrument,” Dolch said.
Dolch said he cannot believe this project is part of his career.
“This is my job. This is awesome,” Dolch said. “It is kind of an adventure.”
