Stargazers search for asteroids

Brookhaven College students in the astronomy division officially recorded evidence of at least one unidentified object during their fall asteroid search initiative.

The asteroid search was part of the International Astronomical Search Collaboration, also known as the IASC campaign, an endeavor in which schools worldwide participate.

One of the main functions of the campaign is to identify potentially hazardous asteroids that could collide with Earth. The Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii posted a video on their website interviewing John Tonry, camera subsystem lead for the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System. Tonry said these asteroids could "not only destroy things all over the planet, but really wreck the ecology."

He said the planet itself would take a long time to recover from such an event before it would be a healthy place for creatures and plants to live again.

The campaign has encouraged students nationwide to collaborate with schools across the globe. Ten of the more than 200 participating schools are in Texas and are part of an international team paired with German institutes.

Dr. J. Patrick Miller, founder of the IASC campaign and former dean of science and math at Brookhaven, recruited the college to get involved and created the opportunity for students to study the stars.

Anahita Sidhwa, professor of physics and astronomy, said, "Instead of making students do the regular indoor, outdoor labs, we could have students do real astronomical research with real data." Professor Chaz Hafey said these studies could help NASA locate harmful asteroids. Hafey runs the IASC campaign on campus, which Brookhaven has been part of for five years.

Telescopes such as the Pan-STARRS can take more than 500 images in one night. The images are sent to the IASC headquarters and are distributed among participating schools, Sidhwa said. Each school receives images of different periods of time. Essentially, students are studying movement in these images. Sidhwa said if they discover a potential asteroid, they send the images and information back to IASC. "They will take another image of it, and then a more professional astronomer will look at it," Sidhwa said.

- Gabriel Secundino

http://former.brookhavencollege.edu/chatter/11/0112/students-seeing-star...