Alexander Antonacio, a recent Physical Sciences Program graduate from Montgomery County Community College, hopes to one day work in a research lab at a university.

During the summer of 2023, Antonacio came closer to that goal. During a week-long field trip to Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, Antonacio—along with fellow Montco students Gabriella Lanza and Ava Wolchukand and Kelli Corrado, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy—worked with his group on research projects.

Montco was joined by Penn State Abington Assistant Teaching Professor Carl Schmiedekamp, Ph.D., and Physics Professor Ann Schmiedekamp, Ph.D., and Penn State students, along with students from other colleges during the trip.

Green Bank Observatory houses the world’s largest fullest steerable radio telescope and is used by scientists and researchers from around the globe, according to its website.

While there, students had the opportunity to see the Green Bank Telescope, designed and built by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The telescope has a 2.3-acre dish surface and a suite of receivers that covers 100 MHz to 100 GHz in frequencies. It can be used to do chemistry, physics, radar receiving, and astronomy and is considered the “best of its kind in the world,” according to NRAO’s website.

“It’s really big,” Antonacio said. “It has to be in order to collect that much data and to collect certain frequencies. It’s definitely not something you can have at your backyard.”

The telescope that the group used was 100 meters in diameter. By comparison, a common backyard telescope ranges from 80 millimeters to 300 millimeters in diameter.

“This was an opportunity for them to experience elite equipment, which is not available to anybody unless you’re a Ph.D.,” said Corrado, noting that the visit to Green Bank was an exceptional experience for students.

Antonacio, along with the other Montco students on the trip, were enrolled in Corrado’s six-week independent-study course during the summer. Many of the students in the study are considering  pursuing STEM fields such as astrophysics. This the first year, Corrado said, that students accompanied her to Green Bank Observatory.

In the classroom, students investigated pulsars, including what they are and how researchers are trying to model and use them. In addition to predicting and measuring the timing of pulsar signals that reach the planet, students sifted through data and reviewed 1,000 potential candidates to determine if they were pulsars.

Corrado is part of a larger collective that has been looking into trying to detect gravity waves in the universe.

“The group I work with are astrophysicists from different countries and at all levels of expertise is called the Pulsar Science Collaboratory,” Corrado said. “They are training our students to sift through the data, which was then used by a much larger collective, NanoGrav, who just detected gravity waves that could allow us to determine if black holes merge when they collide and what gravity was like in our young universe, ‘shortly’ after the Big Bang. It's very exciting and though myself and my students are not part of that larger group, yet, it shows them what their future may look like.”

At Green Bank, students furthered their classroom learning with hands-on lessons.

“We spent about a week going a bit deeper,” Corrado said, adding that students practiced with a 20-meter telescope. “Students learn how to take data and run data collection on their own. It’s a truly independent experience. They learn how to run it through coding software and how to use the software.”

Antonacio, who is taking classes at Montco as a non-degree seeking student before transferring to Temple University in the spring, said he enjoyed the group dynamic of the trip.

“I learned how to work with a group better in a research setting and how we could collaboratively collect data, do research and put it all together,” he said. “That was an important skill to learn. I expect that I will have to work with groups of people to do research in my scientific career.”