Robert Hobbins
Sonoran Science Academy
Benchmarking the Evolutionary State of Young Stars with Photometric Observations
Q. Tell us about your school.
I teach an advanced research methods class at the Sonoran Science Academy. The class gives students the opportunity to do authentic science research. They pick the topic, they do the research. They have to come up with a topic that allows them to go and review the research literature, and they have to come up with the equipment to do the research. They present their results at science fairs around the nation. A lot of that is what we're actually doing here in this experience, so I started this research two years ago, and this whole process I've gone through is helping me to be more effective in the classroom.
Q. What have you found really exciting about your research?
When I was in college, one thing that led me away from astronomy was how much computer programming was involved. I love teaching, but maybe it would have gone differently if I'd had Dr. Doppmann back then, because he helped me to learn the complicated programming language required to analyze images taken from telescopes. It's been really exciting for me to see that I can actually do something that I once thought was impossible.
Q. What are you taking back to the classroom from this work?
We have $5,000 to $6,000 worth of astronomy equipment at our school. I'm hoping to build a dome and possibly work with Kitt Peak to put one up there so the kids can do research and learn some of the same things I've learned. One of the really nice things about astronomy is that it's becoming very accessible to students in many different ways. Students can just take archived data from satellites and telescopes that have produced huge amounts of data , so much that astronomers don't have time to analyze it all. So high school students have begun doing that for them. Two years ago one of my students took Sloan Digital Sky Survey data on active galactic nuclei and measured the sizes of supermassive black holes two different times. One time, radio galaxies; one time quasars. Astronomers used to think they were the same type of object, just rotated in the sky. But she found that they're not. She overturned that theory, and now she's publishing a paper as a freshman in college based on the research she started back in high school. So this knowledge is very accessible to high school kids, and I'm looking forward to bringing it to more students in the future.
* The BIOTECH Project was started at the University of Arizona in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology with funding from the Flinn Foundation. The Project assists teachers in using biotechnology techniques in their classrooms to have students answer novel research questions.
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