Students and a teacher from Hurricane High School have completed                             training at the National                            Radio Astronomy                                  Observatory (NRAO) in                             Green Bank, West                                     Virginia, that prepared                                 them to join                                        astronomers in an                                   exciting search for new                               pulsars. The team from Hurricane High is now part of an international partnership that puts them at the cutting edge of science in using data from the giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT).

"I'm really proud of the students," says Sue Ann Heatherly, the NRAO Education Officer in Green Bank. "Through the course of this week, they lived and breathed pulsar science. It was hard work and long days, but it paid off. They actually learned how to analyze complex data to search for new pulsars. They are pulsar astronomers now."

The team from Hurricane High School includes teacher Bill Dimsdale, and students Erin Fankhanel and Shane Daly.

Pulsars are super-dense neutron stars, the corpses of massive stars that have exploded as supernovae. As the neutron star spins, lighthouse-like beams of radio waves, streaming from the poles of its powerful magnetic field, sweep through space. When one of these beams sweeps across the Earth, radio telescopes can capture the pulse of radio waves.

Pulsars serve as exotic laboratories for studying the physics of extreme conditions. Scientists can learn valuable new information about the physics of subatomic particles, electromagnetics, and General Relativity by observing pulsars and the changes they undergo over time.

Teacher Bill Dimsdale says "This has been a very intense, but wonderful 3 weeks for me.  We (teachers) have been put through a rigorous crash course in pulsar astronomy and are excited to take what we’ve learned back to our students this fall. The access we have had to the facilities and the astronomers at Green Bank has been incredible. I think my students will agree that this is a very unique opportunity to do true science with actual unanalyzed data."

"The Pulsar Search Collaboratory is an excellent experience for hands-on science with real, untouched data," says Shane Daly. 

Student Erin Fankhanel adds, "At first, all the information on how to analyze the data was so overwhelming, but once we started doing it ourselves, it became really, really interesting and easier as we went a long. It was great to work with scientists who know so much about the pulsars and I think that once we inform other kids of the PSC, they will want to join in on the program as well."

The program, called the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, is operated by NRAO and West Virginia University (WVU), and is funded by the National Science Foundation. The Hurricane High School team will receive parcels of data produced by 1500 hours of observing time on the GBT.

Hurricane High School students who did not participate in the summer training are still eligible to join the Pulsar Search Collaboratory. "Erin and Shane will return to their schools as team leaders," says WVU astronomer Maura McLaughlin. "Hopefully, they'll recruit others to create a school-based team. There's plenty of data to go around!"

More than 30 terabytes of data produced by the 17-million-pound GBT will be analyzed by PSC students. These data are expected to contain dozens of new and known pulsars. Since each parcel of data will be analyzed by multiple teams, every team in the project is virtually guaranteed to discover or confirm the discovery of a new pulsar.

"This project gives West Virginia high school students the chance to make groundbreaking discoveries like finding exotic pulsar binary systems, pulsars with planetary systems, or pulsars spinning faster than currently thought possible," says McLaughlin.

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.