Hoover Pulsars Team  member Sam Jett analyzed 39 data sets yesterday during our Data Marathon! He has already qualified for Capstone and pulsar Camp!  Justin from Team OPS came in second with 11 data sets under his belt.  Way to go!  Sathyia from the GB Science Team also passed a critical milestone by passing both pulsar tests while we were online. 

Let’s get you qualified for Capstone AND PSC Camp and help our astronomers out at the same time! We’re gonna be on Zoom tomorrow, April 10 from 3:00-8:00 PM Eastern! If you have not yet passed the pulsar tests, join us. We’ll help you! IF you need to get some data scored, join us! We can answer your questions. Did I mention there will be prizes? Did I mention a wind-up Chewbacca? Hope to see you tomorrow!

Teachers AND students who are joining us for our certification workshop this month:
1. We held a Teacher Informational meeting last week, which has been posted. If you didn’t make that meeting, check it out.
2. Tomorrow, we will host an optional  technical check in at 7 PM using Zoom. Look for an email telling you how to connect. We will show you around the two websites we will be using, and the forum where you will post homework, and have discussions with each other and the PSC astronomers. We will meet by Zoom every week during the workshop.
3. By the end of this week we will post week one materials – a few short intro videos to watch, and a homework assignment. Our official FIRST workshop meeting will be Thursday, February 15 at 7 PM using Zoom. We would like to have a discussion about the week one videos and homework – so do week one work BEFORE the meeting on the 15th.  then we repeat this structure every week.  If you miss a week, just keep up with the work and post to the forum, we will always be there and ready to help!

The Pulsar Search Collaboratory is starting a new round of training for teachers and students in February!! Learn about pulsars from renowned radio astronomers Maura McLaughlin and Duncan Lorimer, and get your hands on some data! Learn more about the program and join us! Our next online training will begin February 1, 2018 with an online meeting with educators, followed by six training modules. This session includes weekly webchats with the astronomers! Don’t miss this!
 

Active PSC student members may sign up for very inexpensive college credits from WVU!  You have to do more work than just qualifying for Capstone or PSC Camp, but it is totally worth it.  If you are interested you can take a look at the PSC_syllabus.2018

If you are interested in enrolling, please email Maura McLaughlin (maura.mclaughlin@mail.wvu.edu) and also apply online at www.access.wvu.edu/apply and complete steps 1 (the online app) and Step 2 (an enrollment form which has to be printed and signed off by a school guidance counselor).

You must have a GPA of at least 3.0 and this form also must be signed by your parents. The course CRN is 17313.

You will be registered once you’ve completed the application.  The cost is $75/credit for both in state and out of state.  This is a really good deal and far cheaper than the cost-per-credit you’d pay as an undergraduate!

Globular clusters are so cool.  They are really old… globular clusters contain the oldest of stars, and date back to the beginning of our Milky Way, and may be a good place to look for alien civilizations!  And they are dense- hosting a million stars in a volume only 100 light years across. It is this fact that interests astronomers using pulsars as a way to probe the inner structure and origin of these ancient relics.

Globular cluster Terzan 5 is home to 37 known pulsars! Many of these are rapidly spinning pulsars known as millisecond pulsars. Astronomers have bean measuring Terzan 5’s uneven tug of gravity on these pulsars to determine the internal structure of the cluster.

Read more here!

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.

Read the rest in WVU Magazine.