Reaching for the Stars

Astronomy class is starting in Cutler 103, but instead of talking about stars and planets, students are discussing senior quotes, due to yearbook staff in a few days. The teens are tossing around ideas, some wondering aloud why the quotes are relevant. Teacher Hughes Pack turns the question around, asking them why a senior quote might be important.

"It’s something to remember you by," offers one student.

Another suggests, "It's something to inspire you."

“To inspire you now or ten years from now?” asks Pack. The students chew on that idea.

Josh Throckmorton ’08 is gravitating toward a quote from the 1993 movie The Sandlot, where the wise figure of the Babe says to the protagonist, Scotty Smalls, “Everybody gets one chance to do something great. Most people never take the chance, either because they’re too scared, or they don’t recognize it when it spits on their shoes.”

Josh ought to know. This class has done something great. Its nine students, led by Pack, have discovered four asteroids, using images from a telescope in Texas. The group is part of a national project in which high schools and colleges search for comets and asteroids, so-called Near Earth Objects (NEOs). The class uses images from large telescopes to take several pictures of a region of the sky during a given time frame, then overlaps the photos and uses computers to search for any moving objects. Typically, a comet or asteroid will appear as a blurry gray dot moving in a constant, straight path.

This October class members found K07TN8K, K07T73P, K07T73O, and K07T15N, asteroids moving through the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The students compared their findings with a database of known objects at the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to see if their NEOs had been discovered by anyone else. They hadn’t.

Pack explains what scientists can gain (besides a heads-up before an asteroid plummets to Earth) by cataloging asteroids. “By counting how many there are, we can begin to build statistical models on what the solar system might have looked like right after it formed—which can help us understand what we see today and what to look for as we find other stars with planets or debris orbiting them.”

Greatness aside, the class today is buckling down to do the grunt work of astronomers: spectral classification—looking at certain measurements of a star (e.g., luminosity or mass) to make estimations about other features, such as its distance from Earth.

Pack presents a graph measuring the luminosity and absolute magnitude of stars. A band across the middle represents regular stars, while giants and supergiants reside where luminosity and mass are greatest. Pack notes that stars like those in the constellation Pleiades are born hot and big and look blue. But they don’t live very long. In 10 million years, they’re gone.

“Are they going to go black?” asks Rebecca Gruening ’09.

“No, these blow up,” says Pack matter-of-factly.

Chelsea Bunker ’08 asks what will happen to our sun.

“It will vaporize the Earth.”

“Is that bad?”

“No. That’s recycling,” quips Pack.

Rebecca follows up: “What about our species?”

“That’s why we need to get off this planet. We need to build a colony on Mars or on the moon,” says Pack.

Then something shifts for Chelsea, and she offers an idea for a senior quote: “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.”