Students will look to the stars and explore a new area of astronomy – multi-messenger analysis, looking for the signs of transient events such as kilonovae.
Project timeline
Multi-Messenger follows IRIS’ 4 phased project structure:
This project, for UK state schools and colleges, is free and fully supported by our team. If you are a secondary, sixth form or college teacher and would like to start this project at your school, you can register to get involved.
Prepare & launch: Teachers prepare and launch the project, using our helpful guidance documents.
Background research & skills development: With access to our support materials, students develop the knowledge and skills required to successfully complete research.
Student Research: Young scientists systematically investigate, explore, discover, analyse and establish their conclusions.
Artefact development and conference: Students produce an article, academic poster presentation or academic paper, based on their research process and/or findings with the aim of exhibiting at an IRIS conference.
Overview
suitability
In this project students will act as the astronomer and follow the steps we take to find interesting transients in the data. They will start by scanning the images that our algorithms think are interesting but will need to watch out for instrumental and software artefacts that have fooled the algorithm.
When they find something interesting, students will plot the data and see if they can interpret the type of object they have found. You never know, they may find an elusive kilonova hidden in the dataset!
Foreword by
Professor Laura Nuttall,
Professor in Gravitational Wave Astronomy,
University of Portsmouth
Suitable for students studying the sciences and physics.
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