He couldn’t use a cell phone or Wi-Fi, but a workshop in West Virginia allowed senior Daniel Halmrast to stand 400 feet off the ground on the radio telescope he had controlled from the basement of Strosacker Science Center.
“The trip far exceeded my expectations,” Halmrast said. “I think the coolest thing was they let us go actually on the telescope.”
Halmrast, Cody Jessup ’16, and Assistant Professor of Physics Timothy Dolch spent May 22-26 at the Green Bank Observatory, which sits in a “radio quiet zone” to prevent unwanted radio signals from reaching the telescope. The student workshop contributed to their research that will be published in a scientific journal, Halmrast said.
“The purpose of the trip was to get the full experience across the entire line of this data processing that we do as part of our research,” Halmrast said. “What I was used to doing at the college was a lot of high level stuff. We’d get data from a bunch of people that are experts in this, and then we’d process the data. But the week in West Virginia, we actually spent doing what all these experts actually do. So I got a good feel of how everything works all together.”
Over the course of the year, Dolch and five students, including Halmrast and Jessup, collected data by controlling the Green Bank Telescope, the world’s largest steerable radio telescope, remotely via computer from campus. Dolch could access the telescope at allotted times, thanks to his participation in a scientific collaboration called the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves.
Because the workshop took place while Jessup and Halmrast were working with Dolch on summer research, Dolch asked them if they wanted to attend, and they said yes.
The workshop was set up by the collaboration and observatory. Dolch said the trip was inexpensive, and Hillsdale College paid for the group to go.
Jessup said about 20 undergraduates from different colleges had plenty to do during the workshop. They learned about the telescope and how to create computer scripts to control it, analyzed data, made observations, and stood on the receiver of the Green Bank Telescope itself.
Jessup and Halmrast said the trip also allowed them to operate the telescope remotely themselves, rather than rely on Dolch’s access.
“Operating the telescope was something I’d been wanting to do for a long time,” Halmrast said. “You can operate the Green Bank Telescope remotely, but they require you to be onsite for a week to do training, before you can actually operate it. The week actually prepped me, so now I can do observations on my own using the telescope.”
Their observations are part of a project the group is working on with the collaboration.
“It’s a project that NANOGrav has been doing for a decade now, and what we do is observe these objects called pulsars,” Dolch said. “A pulsar is a neutron star. Neutron stars are super-dense stars…It’s like the nucleus of an atom but 10 kilometers wide.”
Dolch said from people’s perspective, a pulsar is like a lighthouse: It spins and emits radio waves with a regular pulse that is detectable by the radio telescope.
Gravitational waves, Dolch said, stretch out the distance between pulses, if the waves pass near Earth. Observing the pulses through the radio telescope allows researchers to collect data to find this effect.
“By observing and analyzing these signals, we have the opportunity to see even more of the universe than before,” Halmrast said.
Dolch said Halmrast and Jessup have done so many observations since starting their research in fall 2015 that they are coauthors of a paper that will be published in the Astrophysical Journal sometime in the next year.
“That’s a rare thing for undergraduates,” Dolch said, noting that the paper does have a large author list.
Halmrast and Jessup also presented similar research at the International Pulsar Timing Array conference in South Africa this summer. Halmrast said the Green Bank workshop helped him analyze and understand the 2013 data that he used for the presentation.
This year, about 10 students get together in Strosacker every week to observe pulsars through the telescope. Dolch said he is hopeful that more Hillsdale students will attend the workshop in the future.
“I think it was really exciting to actually go and have a tangible experience with this thing that we’ve been controlling remotely for the past year,” he said. “And it just really imprints in your experience how awesome the science you were doing all along is because you see how huge this thing is — it’s a world renowned observatory.”
