NSF PR 98-79 - November 20, 1998
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High School Students Discover Distant Asteroid Using
NSF Telescope and Education Program
High school students have discovered a previously unidentified
celestial object in the Kuiper Belt using images from
the National Science Foundation's (NSF) 4-meter Blanco
Telescope in Chile.
Heather McCurdy, Miriam Gustafson and George Peterson
of Northfield Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Massachusetts,
one of six Asteroid Search Teams at the school participating
in NSF's innovative Hands-On Universe Program, found
and verified the distant object. It was approximately
100 miles in diameter and now is officially called
1998 FS144.
Astronomy teacher Hughes Pack directed the students'
search of computer images provided by the Berkeley
National Lab's Supernova Cosmology Program. A collaborating
team, Stacey Hinds and Angel Birchard, students from
Pennsylvania's Oil City Area High School, confirmed
the location of 1998 FS144 for their peers at Northfield
Mount Hermon. The Oil City students were led by teacher
Tim Spuck, a 1998 Pennsylvania Christa McAuliffe Fellow.
How significant is the find?
"Only about 72 such objects had been identified in
the Kuiper Belt," says Pack. Kuiper Belt Objects,
found beyond Neptune, are generally believed to be
remnants dating to the formation of our solar system.
"This is a fantastic piece of science, of education,
of discovery," said Hands-On Universe founder and
astrophysicist Carl Pennypacker of Lawrence Berkeley
National Lab and The Lawrence Hall of Science. He
added, "The Northfield students' discovery has shown
that all students from a broad range of backgrounds
can make solid, exciting and inspiring scientific
contributions."
"These students had the opportunity to operate like
real astronomers," said NSF program officer Joseph
Stewart. Star images were obtained by the students
via computer from Cerro- Tololo InterAmerican Observatory
in Chile, Stewart said. Students then used visual
inspection and special Hands-On Universe software.
"One of the historically limiting factors in astronomy
has been simply not having enough eyes available to
inspect all the useful images that astronomers collect,"
he said, "but, it's very exciting that these kids
are contributing to real science, performing actual
science in the classroom!" They are able to measure
the distance of stars and track supernova, for example.
"This generous sharing of data by the Supernova Cosmology
Program scientists," said Pack, "is serving dual purposes,
because scientists at the Supernova Cosmology Group
are using the data to find supernova while students
use the same data to search for very faint asteroids."
"The Kuiper Belt has the potential to tell us a great
deal about how the solar system originated and evolved
and how it compares to others," says Brian Marsden
of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Marsden received the data from Pack and confirmed
the discovery.
Begun in 1990, Hands-On Universe is now based at the
University of California-Berkeley in the Lawrence
Hall of Science. Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory
is one of four divisions of the National Optical Astronomy
Observatories (NOAO), operated by the Association
of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA),
Inc., under cooperative agreement with NSF.
For pictures of KBO 1998 FS144 see: http://astronomy.geecs.org.
For more information on the Hands-On Universe Project
see: http://hou.lbl.gov.
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