Chelen Johnson
Luminous Data Miners: Using ultraviolet images from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite and infrared images from the Spitzer Space Telescope to find a correlation between the color and luminosity of gas emission and dust emission around supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.
While a lot of astronomy is done by computer, nothing compares to having a human look over the data.
I've enjoyed working with NITARP teachers and seeing just how talented they are and how passionate they are about what they teach and about their kids. They want to learn as much as they can here so that they can go and make their classrooms better.
We had a staff meeting this morning and the kids presented our research and shared our experiences to the entire staff. They did an outstanding job and many of our teachers have commented to me how impressed they were by what they did. One of our teachers (and MIT grad) asked a couple of good questions and commented afterward to me he was impressed that they could explain the answer (noting that they were not just number crunching).
