Collin Miller describes the slate of speakers at the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers Western Regional Conference in Arizona this weekend: “There’s doctor this, and doctor someone, PhDs, then you have Berthoud High School STEM students.”
Miller and fellow high school senior, Xander Pickard, will present the research of a team of six Berthoud students, working under five mentors, before an international audience at the conference Saturday .
They will talk about how, using radio astronomy, they discovered that two nebula appear to be moving in two different directions at the same time. That movement would be expected if the nebula were rotating, but they were not.
The students checked their data and calculations, again and again.
Their mentors — University of Colorado research scientist Terry Bullett, science teacher Scott Kindt, Dave Eckhardt, who worked as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Jay Wilson, who worked in telecommunications for federal agencies, and Meinte Veldhuis, president of the Little Thompson Observatory — also double checked the data, then searched journals and publications far and wide.
Published by the Colorado Register-Herald. See more at: http://www.reporterherald.com/news/ci_29627325/berthoud-students-discover-space-anomaly