Pulsar Search Collaboratory
We are busy making preparations for a great PSC Camp this summer! Mentors will arrive this weekend, and teachers and students will arrive on July 10. Can’t wait to see everyone.
We’ll post some interesting tidbits here as the week goes on, so that you can all participate a little bit even if you can’t be here. Look for a “zoom” link to appear in your email and join us remotely when you can!
My apologies for all of the issues folks have had with the PSC application form. I honestly do not know what the problems were, so we created a new application form. Here is the URL: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PulsarCamp
I have tried it and it works for me! So please give it a go, and let me know if you have any issues with this one!
Sue Ann
PSC camp is held at the Green Bank Observatory and is for active student, teacher, mentor, and hub faculty members of the PSC.
Students, teachers and mentors: to be eligible you must pass both PSC data tests and analyze 20 pointings (datasets) on the database, by June 1, 2017. We are here to help, so get cracking!
The application is here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PulsarCamp
We have space for up to 40 students, 20 teachers, 16 mentors, and 4 hub faculty. It’s a blast. We hope you can join us!
Mark your calendars! PSC Camp, is held each summer at the Green Bank Observatory, and includes a mixture of active high school PSC students and teachers, undergraduate mentors, and pulsar astronomers! The 2017 dates have been set: July 10-17, 2017.
Mentors should plan to arrive the evening of the 8th.
Active PSC Members (teachers and students) who successfully pass data analysis tests 1 and 2, AND analyze 20 sets of plots (called pointings) are eligible to attend a Capstone Seminar at your Hub institution. If you do not have an active Hub near you, then you are welcome to join us at the West Virginia University Capstone!
During Capstone you will:
Capstone is awesome! More on this exciting opportunity– dates etc, as we receive them from our hubs!
If you are logged in to the site, you can find the forum by clicking on “Forum”.
The Pulsar Search Collaboratory is expanding with funding from the National Science Foundation. Learn more about the program and then complete this short signup form.
The universe is sending us 10,000 messages every day. You can’t see them. You can’t understand them. But then again, neither can anybody else.
Astrophysics professor Duncan Lorimer was sitting at his desk in Hodges Hall at West Virginia University in early 2007 when one of his undergraduate students walked in. Physics and political science senior David Narkevic had been looking through readouts of radio signals from the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. He was looking for more examples of a kind of rotating star—a pulsar—that emits very short radio signals. And he found something.
It was strange. A dark line in a place on the graph that meant it was incredibly far away. If the reading was right, it was possible that the signal was both a billion light years away and a billion years in the past.
Lorimer took a look. And then he put it aside. It probably wasn’t anything. “I kind of told him to go back to work, and I put it in a drawer,” Lorimer said.
A new header item (Bios) on the PSC homepage will link you to short bios with photos from past/present PSC students and mentors. Bios will be updated on a bi-weekly basis; the latest is brought to you by Jamie — now a senior at Columbia University.