Outreach
Background on the RESOLVE Survey
Galaxies are the luminous markers of a vast cosmic web, whose filaments and clusters condense under gravity while spacetime expands in voids between them. Gas and dark matter are the presumed lifeblood of this multi-scale organism, flowing along its filaments and feeding the growth of its galaxy cells. Yet much of the gas is undetected, and its relationship to invisible dark matter is unknown. To meet this challenge, the RESOLVE Survey combines state-of-the-art optical and radio/millimeter spectroscopy with multi-wavelength photometry to construct an unprecedented integrated view of gas, dark matter, and stars, spanning nearly five orders of magnitude in spatial scale. RESOLVE will disentangle dark matter and undetected gas to relate invisible mass to cosmic structure, illuminating mysteries such as the dramatic large-scale variation of the dwarf-galaxy inventory and the surprising abundance of galaxies like our own, with profound implications for galaxy evolution and cosmology.
A KIPP Pride High School student from Gaston, North Carolina looks at
SOAR telescope data with UNC undergraduate David Hendel
and Prof. Sheila Kannappan in UNC's Remote Observing Center.
Education and Outreach Efforts
We are working to make RESOLVE and ECO accessible to interested students, teachers, and members of the public for scientific exploration. Unlike most astronomical surveys, RESOLVE and ECO provide data that can often (not always!) be readily interpreted without advanced statistics. Our goal is that this website will provide the data in a user-friendly format and also archive a suite of data-driven discovery activities and small research projects for high school and undergraduate students. Progress toward this goal is documented below.
Data Science Portal (DSP): We are building the DSP to guide non-astronomers in a data-based exploration of the basic science of galaxies. The DSP will grow with time. Available tutorials are listed below. AIMs Astronomy Instructional Modules for Physics:
Previously, our team worked with KIPP Pride High School physics teacher Keith Starr and other Teach For America teachers to incorporate astronomy content into high school physics through the AIMs Astronomy Instructional Modules for Physics, which do not involve programming. This series of modules is aligned to the North Carolina state high school physics standards. The FAQ provides a brief summary of key information about AIMs for teachers, and the Sequence Options page shows how the modules can be integrated into a physics course in a variety of combinations to suit the time available, comprising: (i) stand-alone lessons, (ii) two day units, or (iii) extendable several-day units. Modules 3 and 5 cover basic physics topics that need not be repeated if the teacher has already included them elsewhere in the course, with the caveat that the standard NC curriculum does not examine these topics to the necessary depth. Feedback on the AIMs curriculum is welcome to sheila_at_physics_dot_unc dot_edu.
* What is a galaxy? by Zack Hutchens
* Galaxies and their different flavors by Derrick Carr
The above tutorials require no prior knowledge of python programming or galaxies. We thank Leslie Chamberlain of The Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, TN and her high school physics students for vetting and improving these tutorials.
For more ambitious students and teachers, the Computational Astronomy & Physics Boot Camp offers a series of self-paced python tutorials building up to a Jupyter notebook tutorial that offers a simple exploration of ECO data.
We are happy to offer teacher workshops to review relevant science content and specific teaching strategies for this curriculum. Contact sheila_at_physics_dot_unc dot_edu for more information.
SMART Workshops: The Summer Mentorship and Research Training (SMART) workshop was a week-long summer experience offered on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill for teacher-student pairs already familiar with AIMs Modules 1-8 and a basic programming tutorial. In the first half of the week, Prof. Kannappan and graduate students mentored participating teachers and students closely on research methods and background science. In the second half, teachers took on a guided mentorship role while aiding their students in the design and completion of a small astrophysics research project. Due to new restrictions on working with minors on campus, we discontinued SMART in 2013. The Data Science Portal above offers an alternative way for teachers and students to learn basics of programming and explore astronomical data.