Abstract:

In the contest of encouraging STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers it is important to complement activities or lessons aimed at discovering the beauty and fascination of science with initiatives capable to communicate what the actual scientific research work consists of. For this reason, we have developed a one-day activity dedicated to students of the last years of High School, in which participants become scientists and run the process of research on galaxies and black holes: from focusing the scientific problem to looking at telescope images, from analysis of real data to achievement of results.

The idea of putting High School students to work on real research data dates back to 2005, when CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) started to develop the so-called “masterclass”, a one or two day activity during which participants would deal with simplified versions of data and procedures coming from particles physics experiments. Following that model, we developed a similar activity focused on the astrophysics research carried on in our Department.

The activity starts in the morning, when participants are welcomed in our University, and spend four hours preparing the theoretical foundations of their work through seminars held by researchers and professors. In this way they learn some of the things we know about our Universe: its birth and expansion, what are the celestial objects we can observe and how we measure some of their features such as distance or luminosity. After lunch things get more practical: the participants, divided in groups, begin to deal with a series of astrophysical images obtained by different telescopes: the Very Large Telescope (VLT/ESO - European Southern Observatory), the Spitzer Space Telescope (NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the XMM-Newton (ESA - European Space Agency) space telescope. Of course, these images were already analyzed by our researchers, but the participants can retrace in a simpler and more intuitive way that analysis step by step through a Python code we developed. As a result, participants manage to draw scientific information from the images of galaxies, obtaining the chemical elements they are made of, their distance, how fast they are moving away from us, the number of stars they host and if they have a supermassive black hole in their core. In this talk, we describe our activity in detail, also showing its strengths and critical aspects.

Keywords:

STEM careers, Secondary Education, Learning and Teaching Methodologies, Learning by doing & Experiential Learning, Science, Astrophysics, Black holes, Galaxies.