EC Science presentation

Edmunds Central student Theo Haerter and science teacher Spencer Cody presented on astronomy research at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) winter meeting in New Orleans the second week of January.

Cody explained, "At the meeting they were joined by other educators and students from the NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research Program (NITARP). For over a decade, NITARP has partnered small groups of educators with a research astronomer for original, year-long, authentic research projects.

At the AAS meeting, the educators from the 2023 class, along with some of their students, presented on the results of their work over the past year. Meanwhile, the educators from the 2024 class met their teams and started on their own projects.

From NITARP's early years through the 2024 class, a total of 145 educators from 42 states have participated; the 2023 class has our first participants from South Dakota, West Virginia, and Maryland. NITARP works with educators because, through them, NITARP reaches thousands of students per year with information about how science really works, what NASA does, and the wealth of astronomy data that is freely available to the public.

Edmunds Central's team worked with Gaia and Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) data to study galaxies. The space-based Gaia survey telescope has a database of 1.2 billion sources that have been monitored for years to detect their motion on the sky induced by the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. This apparent motion is called parallax. Close objects should show greater parallax than further objects. But a small number of very far galaxies have unexpectedly shown significant parallax values in the Gaia data. This NITARP team tried to see how pervasive these unexpected parallaxes were in the Gaia data. They used a catalog of over 4 million far away galaxies identified by the space-based NASA WISE telescope and matched them to the Gaia catalog. Because those galaxies are so far away, they should not have a parallax value in the Gaia catalog. But the team discovered over 400 sources that showed this unexpected parallax and tried to pin down whether these parallax values are reliable or the result of nearby sources that may be confusing the Gaia measurements."