Author: Alexandria Romasanta

2020 High School Summer Research Experience in Astronomy Goes Remote!

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Story By: Gretchen Oehlschlager

Top to bottom, left to right:

Students: Madeline Oh, Manal Vishnoi, Violet Berlin, August Masley, Mark Wehner, Estrella Popoca, Julien Kearns, Nicholas Hurst, Francisco Pantoja, JT Turner, Brandon Lu

Northwestern: Anastasia Montgomery, Patrick Sheehan, Alexandria Romasanta, Giacomo Fragione, Michael Stroh, Monica Gallegos-Garcia, Michael Katz, Kyle Rocha, Nick Kaaz

The CIERA High School Summer Research Experience in Astronomy at Northwestern provided an interactive, hands-on astronomy research experience for high school students remotely this summer, hosting 12 students from June 29 – August 7.

The small-cohort program provided an atmosphere of team-based learning alongside mentorship from Northwestern faculty, researchers, and student astronomers. Participants took computer programming classes, listened to astronomy lectures on cutting-edge research, and tackled advanced readings.

Instead of assigning students to individual research projects, the remote-adapted program allowed all students to work collaboratively on multiple, week-long research learning endeavors. One of these projects involved the students learning how to read and utilize data from the Gaia space telescope to map the evolutionary stages of the life of a star.

“We had really great staff, grad students, postdocs, and students that were a part of this,” said program director Patrick Sheehan. “They were able to adapt on the fly and put together some really great projects that the students were able to enjoy doing and get a good exposure to research.”

Congratulations to all of the students that participated in the summer program and thank you to all who worked to make this experience possible!

Students in 2019 “High School Summer Research Experience in Astronomy” Present Their Research at Annual Poster Session

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Story By: Alexandria Romasanta

CIERA’s High School Summer Research Experience in Astronomy is an interactive, cohort program that provides high school students with exposure to real astronomy research experience.

This summer, 14 high school students took part in this six-week program from June 24th to August 2nd. Students participated in introductory astronomy lessons covering topics such as cosmology, astronomy simulations, black holes and gravitational waves and introductory programming lessons in Python and GitHub.

They had the opportunity to work on a research project with a CIERA graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, or faculty member providing guidance and mentoring.

CIERA Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Patrick Sheehan served as the Program Coordinator and CIERA Ph.D student Shi Ye helped co-coordinate the courses and activities for this program.

On August 1st, 2019 the students participated in a poster session at Northwestern, in which they had the opportunity to showcase their research projects to all of CIERA and members of the community.

Congratulations to all of the students that participated in the summer research program and thank you to all of the graduate students, faculty and staff that helped make this program possible!

High School Researcher Takes Gold at State Science Fair

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Story By: Lydia Rivers (@lydiuhrivers)

Elizabeth Welch-Jani won the highest award possible at the Illinois Junior Academy of Science State Fair for her paper on the astrophysics research she has conducted over the last year under Associate Director of CIERA, Professor Shane Larson. At the state competition at Southern Illinois University, she was awarded Gold and Top Paper recognition in the Senior Division, along with a monetary prize. Hers was the only paper in the Astronomy category to earn top ten honors.

Elizabeth submitted a 40-page paper and presented her work to a panel of judges at the state competition, and said that “It was fun to answer the judges’ questions and have the opportunity to demonstrate the depth of knowledge I have gained through my research. It was a lot of work, and it is empowering to know that I can communicate these complicated concepts effectively.”

A 15-year-old rising senior at Glenbrook South High School (GBS), Elizabeth will be spending this summer studying abroad in Spain for two weeks, running a community-focused and reasonably priced tutoring company with fellow GBS classmates, working on college applications, and continuing the research she began a year ago on gravitational waves from white dwarf binaries, with hopes of publishing a paper before school starts again.

“I’m predicting the gravitational wave signal that LISA will see from binary white dwarf stars in the dark matter halo of the Milky Way Galaxy. What I’ve been doing is creating a simulation to populate the dark matter halo with white dwarf binaries.” LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, is a space-based gravitational wave observatory that will be launched in 2034.

Elizabeth has been taking data from Larson’s former graduate student Katie Breivik’s simulation for entire galaxies and making histograms of the mass and period distributions of white dwarfs to create her own simulation. The goal is to use the new simulation to calculate the gravitational wave signal LISA will detect from white dwarfs, which may help inform our understanding of the composition of dark matter.

The beginning of her research career came about two years ago, when Elizabeth spoke with Professor Larson after a lecture he gave on gravitational waves. This led her to participate in CIERA’s High School Student Summer Research Program where she learned about astronomy, computer programming, and data analysis, before being able to work on individual research projects. She began researching with Larson independently of the program last summer and throughout the 2018-19 school year. She is excited to continue her research position this summer.

“I’ve wanted to be an astrophysicist since I was 3. I’ve always loved space,” Elizabeth said. “It’s fun to do research, and I feel really lucky to have this opportunity. I’ve known what I’m interested in for a long time, so to be able to actually find out something and possibly make a difference has really solidified my passion for astrophysics.”