Teens Helping to Uncover Universe’s Secrets
Thirteen-year-old Markar Aghajanian is an astrophysicist in the making.
Huddled over a computer at San Fernando Middle School, he is searching for the source of ultra high-energy cosmic rays.
The eighth-grader is watching colorful graphs and charts flicker across the computer screen -- tell-tale signs of electrons and other elementary particles screaming down through the atmosphere and striking two pyramid-like detectors on the roof of the school’s computer lab.
With a backpack slung over his shoulder, Markar explains that the energy for the cosmic ray “shower” originates in high-energy supernovae, black holes and spiraling galaxies in the far reaches of the universe.
“I feel like I’m a scientist,” he says. “Now I know what I want to be.”
Markar isn’t the only junior scientist working on the heady experiment.
San Fernando Middle School is one of 50 public and private schools and colleges in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys that are helping Caltech characterize the high-energy cosmic rays.
Each school has two detectors, each about three feet high and looking like the cone of a rocket ship.
The sensors detect speeding electrons, photons and positrons (the positive counterpart to the electron), and transmit the information to computers at the schools. Those computers feed data back to Caltech, which has undertaken the project with help from Cal State Northridge and UC Irvine.
San Fernando Middle School is the latest campus to join the network, known as the California High School Cosmic Ray Observatory. Caltech plans to expand to an additional 40 schools over the next six months or so. The detectors will collect data for three to five years.
Researchers hope the project will provide clues to the development of the universe and give young people a hands-on introduction to a field they might choose later in life.
“What we hope to do is give the students tools to learn about science and to develop their own research projects for reports in class, science fairs or competitions,” said Robert McKeown, a Caltech physics professor who is leading the research project. “That will hopefully get them interested in pursuing science as a career.”
Among the other schools participating are Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, Granada Hills High School, South Pasadena High School and Blair High School in Pasadena.
Schools do not pay to be part of the observatory project; officials say the estimated $500,000 in costs so far has been paid by Caltech, the National Science Foundation and the Weingart Foundation.
Caltech scientists say that schools are perfect partners for the research project. They offer high-speed Internet access. They also are close enough together to form a kind of net to catch the ultra high-energy cosmic ray showers that occur when protons from distant galaxies collide with nuclei in Earth’s atmosphere, sending a cascade of particles below.
The showers last about a millionth of a second and present no harm to life. They can occur as often as once a minute at an individual site but as rarely as a few times a year across the entire network of detectors, scientists say.
As research partners, the schools have another advantage: They are filled with eager young students such as Markar, who are getting a rare opportunity to explore the wonders of the universe and the complexities of scientific discovery.
Students from some of the schools get to attend weeklong summer programs at Caltech, where they learn how the cosmic ray detectors work and get to assemble the equipment with electric circuitry and soldering irons.
Markar is sold. After school on a recent day, he hovered over the computer his campus received last week. He didn’t understand all of the science at play or the squiggly lines jumping across the computer screen. But he was giddy at being engaged in something significant and scientific.
“People say we use 11% of our brain. But we’re using 16% by doing this experiment,” he said. “So we’re getting smarter.”
Markar’s classmate, Guadalupe Becerra, was just as intrigued.
“In my imagination, I figure out how they look -- really small,” Guadalupe, 13, said of the particles striking the detectors on the roof. “It is really cool to do this experiment. Even some high schools and adults don’t know what this is.”
For San Fernando Middle School science teacher Bart Lennehan, the science project also has kindled enthusiasm.
He talks excitedly about the prospect that his students will learn about electrons and protons and the physics of the universe. But this work, he says, also offers a chance to teach about discovery for discovery’s sake.
“Science is not just one person sitting in a back room by himself,” Lennehan said. “It’s a collaboration of minds, a group of people trying to generate experiments and data” that will point to a conclusion.
Across the San Fernando Valley, at Chaminade College Preparatory Middle School in Chatsworth, students and faculty are also energized by their involvement in the research.
Maintenance crews have painted the two detectors with the school colors, orange and blue. The school also has built a little fence and planted flowers around the sensors.
Principal Christine Hunter said the project had brought science home to her students, who sign onto the project’s Web site to see new data as it becomes available.
“It’s being a part of something that is bigger than your own science project,” Hunter said of the Caltech effort. “It’s not like something they are going to read about that happened 6,000 miles away. It’s happening every day, even as we speak.”
For information about the research project, go to: https://www.chicos.Caltech.edu/
