Searching Among the Stars

Arches, Students

Austin Glock ’23 spent his nights last summer in the Puget Sound observatory atop Thompson Hall, looking for planets outside our solar system.

It’s a cold, clear night in the pitch-black dome of the observatory at University of Puget Sound. In the dark, Austin Glock ’23 makes minute adjustments to the telescope by the light of a headlamp. He’s focusing on Arcturus, a bright orange star located 37 lightyears away. He’s using Arcturus to calibrate the telescope in order to observe something that few people have ever seen—a planet orbiting another star in our galaxy.

“I’m doing differential star photometry, which means we’re looking at stars with light levels that fluctuate. This could be due to a number of factors, but one thing it might mean is that there’s a planet orbiting that star,” Glock says. “By measuring how much the light dips, how long it dips for, and the shape of the resulting light curve, we can determine whether or not it is an exoplanet [one found outside of our solar system] and get some information about its orbital period and size.”

Glock spent most nights last summer in the observatory, which is located on the roof of Thompson Hall clock tower and requires climbing eight flights of stairs and one ladder to access. His project is part of Puget Sound’s long-running summer research program, which enables undergraduate students to design and carry out projects in the sciences and humanities under the guidance of a faculty advisor.

Austin Glock and Tsunefumi Tanaka in the observatory.

Austin Glock ’23 loved searching for exoplanets under the direction of faculty member Tsunefumi Tanaka. “It’s the most worthwhile experience I’ve had at school,” he says.

Glock partnered with Tsunefumi Tanaka, visiting assistant professor of physics, to identify, using a NASA database, stars suspected of having planets. After successfully observing several known exoplanets, the next step was searching for unconfirmed planetary candidates— and hoping to image the right patch of sky at precisely the right moment to catch a planet in transit in front of its host star.

The process involves linking the observatory’s massive telescope to two separate computers. Glock explains: “Using those computers, we’ll take images, then we’ll calibrate the images and process them using specialty software, like AstroImageJ, to refine them and get our final light graphs.

“Once I processed our first data set, it conformed to the known data really well,” Glock says. “That was amazing for me to see, just knowing that I took pictures of an exoplanet several light-years away.”

Glock, who grew up in Glenwood Springs, Colo., ended up at Puget Sound almost by accident. He had looked at a number of colleges and was “pretty settled” on one elsewhere in Washington state. “Then Puget Sound contacted me and they’re like, ‘Hey, we’re doing a special tour day, if you want to come down and take a look.’ And I thought, It couldn’t hurt. Might as well.” He toured the campus and sat in on a class with Physics Professor Andy Rex. “It was great,” he says. “I fell in love with the campus, I fell in love with the professors I met, and it just felt exactly like where I needed to be for college.”

The week before he arrived on campus, he happened to buy a book called The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth, by Elizabeth Tasker, at the Barnes & Noble in Lakewood. He became more curious about how planets are formed, and when he saw a chance to do summer research on the topic, “I wanted to hop on that as soon as possible.”

“That was amazing for me to see, just knowing that I took pictures of an exoplanet several lightyears away.”

Last summer he spent just about every clear night in the observatory, heading up around 9:00 p.m. and spending four to six hours setting up the equipment and collecting the images. When not working on his research, he trained the telescope, just for fun, on other objects in the night sky, like the Moon, the planet Saturn, and star clusters.

He had been hesitant about signing on for a summer research project—“I was like, ‘I don’t want to have to write that much’”—but is happy he did. “It’s the most worthwhile experience I’ve had while at school,” he says. He especially enjoyed the weekly Wednesday get-togethers where students doing summer research in various fields shared their experiences with each other.

As a physics major with minors in mathematics and English, Glock is passionate not only about astronomy but about science communication and conveying the discoveries in the field to a broad audience. After graduation, he hopes to attend graduate school and continue to be a part of the hunt for more planets beyond our solar system.

“One of the biggest things that comes with researching anything outside of our own solar system is understanding how other solar systems form,” he says. “We don’t know if our solar system is rare, or if planets like the Earth are common. So, by understanding different planetary formations and other star systems, we can better understand our own.

“Having the opportunity to do that while still an undergraduate has been incredible.”

Glock’s research was funded by a grant from the Alan S. Thorndike Summer Research Endowed Fund, which was created in memory of a longtime Puget Sound physics professor.