Tag: Ken Taylor

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Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Learning & Education Researcher news SMU In The News Student researchers

KERA: Telescope-Wielding Twosome: High School Students Discover New Stars

Their five stars will be known by 16-digit serial numbers. Dominik would have rather immortalized his four dogs.

Lake Highlands High School students Dominik Fritz (left) and Jason Barton collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness. (Credit: KERA)
Lake Highlands High School students Dominik Fritz (right) and Jason Barton collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness. (Credit: KERA)

Reporter Courtney Collins with the news team at public radio station KERA covered the discovery of five stars made by two Dallas high school students as members of an SMU summer physics research program. Called Quarknet, the program enabled the students to analyze data gleaned from a high-powered telescope in the New Mexico desert.

All five stars are eclipsing contact binary stars, pairs of stars that orbit around each other so closely that their outer atmospheres touch. As the stars eclipse, they dim and then brighten as one emerges from behind the other. These stars are categorized as variable stars, stars that change brightness, which make up half the stars in the universe.

Lake Highlands High School seniors Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are the first high school researchers at SMU to discover new stars.

Fritz and Barton are among nine high school students and two high school physics teachers who conducted physics research at SMU through the QuarkNet program.

Collins’ segment published and aired Sept. 4, “Telescope-Wielding Twosome: High School Students Discover New Stars.”

Listen to the segment and read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Courtney Collins
KERA News
To most teenagers, star-gazing is the stuff of first dates.

For two seniors at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas, star-gazing over the summer led to five unusual discoveries.

In some respects, Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are typical high-schoolers. Jason’s haircut would make a pop star envious and Dominik’s snazzy specs are effortlessly cool.

When these two kids start to talk science, you realize quickly, they’re two in a million.

“I’m personally fascinated by nuclear reactions and that’s basically what happens in stars, it’s full of nuclear reactions, nuclear fusion, a little bit of fission,” Dominik says.

That set of interests made Dominik a perfect candidate for a summer physics program at SMU. Jason and two other Richardson school district students joined him.

While analyzing data from a high-powered telescope, Jason noticed a few stars that weren’t already in the database.

“I started looking over several nights and seeing if they were actual variable stars and if they did change in brightness over time, and then I combined them all and then I eventually submitted it,” Jason says.

In fact, both teens made submission to an international star index that were accepted. Between them, they’d discovered five eclipsing binary contact stars. Dominik translates:

“Two very, very large star systems that are so close that they actually share their atmospheres.”

Lake Highlands physics teacher Ken Taylor says not many kids make it to upper level physics. That’s why he was so keen to get these students out of the textbook and into real research.

“It was beautiful for me to see my students who were going and forging ahead and taking things that they had learned and going into new territory and seeing the looks on their faces when they began to go somewhere where, in a sense, no one had gone before.”

Listen to the segment and read the full story.

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Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News Student researchers

DMN: Two high school students discover variable stars during SMU summer program

Two high school students collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness.

Lake Highlands High School students Dominik Fritz (left) and Jason Barton collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness. (Credit: DMN)
Lake Highlands High School students Dominik Fritz (left) and Jason Barton collected data until they had what they needed to define their star-to-be as a variable — a star that changes brightness. (Credit: DMN)

Reporter Alexis Espinosa with the Dallas Morning News covered the discovery of five stars made by two Dallas high school students as members of an SMU summer physics research program. Called Quarknet, the program enabled the students to analyze data gleaned from a high-powered telescope in the New Mexico desert.

All five stars are eclipsing contact binary stars, pairs of stars that orbit around each other so closely that their outer atmospheres touch. As the stars eclipse, they dim and then brighten as one emerges from behind the other. These stars are categorized as variable stars, stars that change brightness, which make up half the stars in the universe.

Lake Highlands High School seniors Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are the first high school researchers at SMU to discover new stars.

Fritz and Barton are among nine high school students and two high school physics teachers who conducted physics research at SMU through the QuarkNet program.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Alexis Espinosa
Dallas Morning News
Dominik Fritz sat in a Southern Methodist University science lab sifting through data. He hoped to discover a star by searching through months of information collected from a telescope in the New Mexico desert 14 years ago.
And then he found it.

He found a star whose variation had not yet been defined. And he would be the one to define it.

He collected data until he had everything he needed to define it as a variable — a star that changes brightness. A day after he submitted the star to the American Association of Variable Star Observers, the organization requested a few minor corrections.

And then, his star was accepted.

“I was so, so happy. My name is out there. I felt like I really accomplished something,” Fritz said. “I can literally tell people … ‘I found a star.’”

Fritz and a classmate, Jason Barton, both discovered stars this summer as part of the SMU’s QuarkNet program.

QuarkNet is a physics teacher development program funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy in universities and laboratories across the country. SMU’s QuarkNet program, which began in 2000, also provides research opportunities to high school students like Fritz and Barton, who are seniors at Lake Highlands High School in Richardson ISD.

Read the full story.

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Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Learning & Education Student researchers

Eclipsing binary stars discovered by high school students at SMU summer research program

Treasures of the night sky: Pairs of stars orbit around each other so closely their outer atmospheres touch, so they dim and brighten.

Artist's impression of an eclipsing binary star system. As the two stars orbit each other they pass in front of one another and their combined brightness, seen from a distance, decreases.
Artist’s impression of an eclipsing binary star system. The stars pass in front of one another and their combined brightness decreases. (Credit: European Southern Observatory)

Two Dallas high school students discovered five stars as members of an SMU summer physics research program that enabled them to analyze data gleaned from a high-powered telescope in the New Mexico desert.

All five stars are eclipsing contact binary stars, pairs of stars that orbit around each other so closely that their outer atmospheres touch. As the stars eclipse, they dim and then brighten as one emerges from behind the other. These stars are categorized as variable stars, stars that change brightness, which make up half the stars in the universe.

Lake Highlands High School seniors Dominik Fritz and Jason Barton are the first high school researchers at SMU to discover new stars.

Their discoveries have been accepted into the American Association of Variable Star Observers International Variable Star Index (VSX).

New discoveries in Pegasus, Ursa Major are registered with Variable Star Index

The stars are located in the northern sky constellations of Pegasus and Ursa Major, but can’t be seen by the naked eye.

Lake Highlands High School student Dominik Fritz and teacher Ken Taylor at SMU. Fritz participated in Quarknet, a Dedman Physics program for area high school students. (Photo Credit here)
Lake Highlands High School student Dominik Fritz and teacher Ken Taylor at SMU. Fritz participated in Quarknet, an SMU Physics Department program for area high school students. (Photo Credit here)

Working in a campus science building basement laboratory, the students used analysis software, perseverance and patience to parse the data collected (but never analyzed for the purpose of studying binary stars) in 2000 by Robert Kehoe, SMU associate professor of physics.

Kehoe collected the data through ROTSE-I, a prototype robotic telescope at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

“Scientists are driven by the sense of discovery,” says Kehoe, who took the data originally to study gamma ray bursts. “These students can lay claim to information that didn’t exist before their research.”

SMU only university in North Texas offering the nation’s QuarkNet program
Fritz and Barton are among nine high school students and two high school physics teachers conducting physics research at SMU through the QuarkNet program.

QuarkNet is a physics teacher development program with 50 centers at U.S. universities and national laboratories. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, the program gives teachers and students opportunities to learn about the most recent discoveries in physics.

Other sponsors include two of the world’s leading high-energy physics research centers — CERN in Switzerland and Fermilab in Illinois. SMU is one of four Texas universities to offer the QuarkNet program and the only QuarkNet university in North Texas.

“High school physics curriculum includes very little modern physics,” says Simon Dalley, a member of the SMU physics faculty and coordinator of its QuarkNet program. “This hurts recruitment to the field and prevents the general population from understanding physics’ contribution to the modern world.”

Ken Taylor, Lake Highlands High School physics teacher, is determined to introduce new physics research to his students. He has participated in QuarkNet at SMU since 2000, seizing opportunities to join physics researchers at high-energy particle colliders at CERN and Fermilab. This is the first summer he has selected students to join him in physics research at SMU.

“I like to support students beyond the classroom walls,” he says. “These students have gone through the whole process of scientific discovery and can use these projects as jumping off points for the next phases of their lives.”

With acceptance into the VSX catalog of variable stars, the students’ names are forever linked with their stars on the official registry.

But instead of creating new star names, star discoverers follow a protocol that includes the name of the telescope and the stellar coordinates.

Dominik Fritz discovered ROTSE1 J115128.40+493130.5, ROTSE1 J120809.03+503321.7 and ROTSE1 J232109.31+170125.6.

Jason Barton can include his stars, ROTSE1 J223452.37+175210.5 and ROTSE1 J223707.20+212657.9, on his resume.

Both students plan to pursue science careers, Fritz in nuclear engineering and Barton in medicine.

Other student QuarkNet researchers include KeShawn Ivory from Garland High School and Madison Monzingo and Lane Toungate from Lake Highlands High School. In addition, Hockaday School teacher Leon de Oliveira and his four students – Eliza Cope, Allison Aldrich, Sarah Zhou and Mary Zhong — also conducted QuarkNet research this summer.

“These students have made a real contribution to science,” says Farley Ferrante, the former high school physics teacher and current SMU astrophysics graduate student who supervised the students’ research. “A better understanding of variable stars helps us to understand the age and formation of the universe; the sun, which is a variable star; and even the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.”