Kids Discovering new Asteroids
Reported March 2008
SEATTLE, Wash. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- In the past, it's always been hard to convince young women and minorities to major in the sciences. A new university mentoring program has not only gotten students interested in majoring in astronomy, it's also helping them get their names in the sky.
These kids are going to need many more monikers to officially name the 1,300 asteroids they've found. The students were initially looking for supernovae as part of program to get kids hooked on science from their first days in college.
"It turns out we were finding more asteroids than supernovae, so we decided we'd do some science with it," says Andrew Becker, a research assistant at the University of Washington in Seattle.
At first, these young researchers used their eyes to find the fast moving rocky celestial bodies. Looking through the sets of images, the students found dozens of asteroids, but they found 1,300 when they automated the process on a computer.
Now the young astronomers are hooked … and they also have a lot of decisions to make on what to name the asteroids.
These student scientists are now looking at the color and orbit of the different asteroids they found and hope to publish research on asteroid families before they graduate.
The American Astronomical Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:
Andrew Becker, Ph.D.
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195-1580
(206) 685 0542
becker@astro.washington.edu
American Astronomical Society
Washington, DC 20009-1231
(202) 328-2010
http://www.aas.org
aas@aas.org
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