SCSU Professor Surveys Nearby Stars With His Students

Dr. Elliott Horch, an astrophysicist and professor at Southern Connecticut State University, is working on two astronomy projects with his graduate students that involve studying the stars of our solar system using high resolution images.

Project 1: A survey of nearby stars

Most people would think that we have looked at the stars in our solar system enough. But Dr. Horch argues that we haven't looked at the stars with the very best imaging currently available. The kind of work that Dr. Horch does involves taking very, very clear pictures of stars so he can really put these nearby stars under the microscope with the kinds of imaging techniques that he is an expert in. The project is meant to do a complete survey of stars that are within about 150 light years of the solar system, and to investigate how many of those are actually not just single stars, but have companion star that orbits around them. Dr Horch and his students at SCSU study what fraction of stars are binaries.

Project 2: Building a new kind of technology instrument on the SCSU campus

Dr. Horch and his students' goal is to get very, very clear image information when studying the nearby stars. So the instrument they are building is sort of a two telescope arrangement where they use something called interferometry to get very, very high resolution imaging information. Dr Horch and his students have really enjoyed this endeavor. His graduate students really like working on this project, because they get to build things and try prototype designs.

In addition to these two exciting projects, Dr. Horch also is responsible for developing, designing, and building a high resolution imaging camera that can be used with large telescopes on the ground. Scientists can use his camera to get a very clear picture of what is going on around a bright star. The basis of his camera is that it's a device that allows scientists to beat the turbulence in the atmosphere. The turbulence is what causes the blurring of images. What his camera does is take very, very rapid pictures in two different colors at the same time. This allows scientists to take individual exposures that shows them what the turbulence is doing, moment by moment. Then mathematically, they can analyze those images, and there’s a process by which they can reconstruct what the image must have looked like before the atmosphere blurred out the image. Scientists can take that image and make it look like it was taken from outer space, even though it was taken from a telescope located on earth. Typically, his camera cannot look at things which are super faint, but for reasonably bright things, he can get extremely high quality images. It’s much better imaging than if scientists just take a standard exposure in astronomy.

Dr. Horch spoke with Hanna and Cari at Mybookcart.com about space exploration, astronomy projects at CSCU, and his high resolution imaging camera.