Published: September 24, 2009 02:37 am      

South Harrison student discovers space object

CHARLESTON — A West Virginia high school student has discovered a new object in space — a type of neutron star called a rotating radio transient, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory said.

Sophomore Lucas Bolyard of South Harrison High School in Lost Creek made the discovery in March. He was participating in a project in which students are trained to analyze data from the giant radio telescope in Green Bank.

Astronomers at West Virginia University examined Bolyard’s findings and determined it’s among only about 30 known types of rotating radio transients.

Bolyard was participating in a joint project of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and West Virginia University. It is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Earlier this year Bolyard had studied more than 2,000 data plots from the Green Bank Telescope and found nothing.

“I was home on a weekend and had nothing to do, so I decided to look at some more plots from the GBT,” he said. “I saw a plot with a pulse, but there was a lot of radio interference, too. The pulse almost got dismissed as interference.”

He reported the findings, which were examined by WVU astronomers Maura McLaughlin and Duncan Lorimer. They scheduled new observations of the region where the pulse came from, but follow-up observations showed nothing, indicating the object was not a normal pulsar.

In July, Bolyard was at the Green Bank observatory with other students. Using raw data, Lorimer showed Bolyard a new plot of his pulse that indicated it was real and not interference.

While pulsars emit radio waves continuously, rotating radio transients emit only sporadically, one burst at a time, with as much as several hours between bursts. They are difficult to observe — the first one was discovered in 2006.

“These objects are very interesting, both by themselves and for what they tell us about neutron stars and supernovae,” McLaughlin said. “We don’t know what makes them different from pulsars — why they turn on and off. If we answer that question, it’s likely to tell us something new about the environments of pulsars and how their radio waves are generated.

“They also tell us there are more neutron stars than we knew about before, and that means there are more supernova explosions. In fact, we now almost have more neutron stars than can be accounted for by the supernovae we can detect.”