University of Puget Sound Student Searches for Planets Around Distant Stars

Students

Austin Glock ’23 combs the night sky for exoplanets using the university’s rooftop observatory

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 which 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 and get some information about its orbital period and size.”

Glock spent most nights this 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. Glock's research was funded by a grant from the Alan S. Thorndike Summer Research Endowed Fund, which was created in memory of a long-time physics professor at Puget Sound.

For his research, Glock partnered with Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics Tsunefumi Tanaka to identify stars suspected of having planets using a NASA database. 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.

“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 lightyears away.”

Austin Glock ’23 is one of nearly a hundred undergraduate students who participate in summer research projects each year at Puget Sound.

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

“What’s interesting to me is that 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.”