Studying the Mysteries of the Universe

By Livvie Avrick ’19

“Everything about these research experiences is surprising and challenging.”
Riley McGlasson

Under the vast night sky at Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park last summer, astronomy ranger Riley McGlasson ’20 hiked with visitors into the canyon during the full moon, led talks, and hosted telescope nights that revealed planets, star clusters, and galaxies. McGlasson had pursued invaluable research opportunities the previous two summers, but this experience reminded her of an important lesson: “Teaching the general public really brings me back to what I loved about astronomy in the first place,” she says.

Ever since McGlasson (Eden Prairie, Minn.) realized through her “Extrasolar Planets and Astrobiology” first-year course that studying astronomy could be a career, she’s immersed herself in outreach and research, on and off campus: helping at Mac’s public observing nights, running the “Radio Astronomy” WMCN radio show, publishing research, and winning a prestigious national award.

In addition to traveling to Bryce Canyon, McGlasson’s summer breaks have included studying solar physics at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and observing asteroids through the Solar System Radar team at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory.

“Everything about these research experiences is surprising and challenging,” says McGlasson. “That’s just the nature of it, though: we’re researching things that we don’t fully understand.”

Studying the Universe

As a field that encompasses the entire rest of the universe, astronomy—quite literally—offers endless opportunities to learn.

At NASA Marshall in 2017, McGlasson used extreme ultraviolet images and images of the magnetic flux from the sun’s photosphere to look at small plasma eruptions in the Solar corona, or atmosphere, and analyze why they occur.

That meant combing through years of solar data to find records of these small eruptions, downloading and processing data, and combining the images of the plasma and of the magnetic field to test McGlasson’s hypothesis about why they happen.

“I found that these plasma eruptions were primarily caused by magnetic flux cancellation, which is where positive and negative patches of magnetic flux some together and cancel, which makes the surrounding field unstable and allows plasma to rise up, forming the jet,” says McGlasson.

A product of that research was published in the September 2019 volume of the Astrophysical Journal, with McGlasson as the manuscript’s first author.

During summer 2018 at the Arecibo Observatory, McGlasson used the Arecibo 305 meter telescope to shoot high-powered radio waves at asteroids and measure the signals that came back. The data was then used to develop a three-dimensional shape model of Midas, an asteroid that is classified as potentially hazardous.

Typically there were five to seven observations each week. “Sometimes these were during the day, which is possible with a radio telescope like Arecibo, but usually they were in the middle of the night, so sometimes I would have to wake up and go to work at 3 a.m.,” McGlasson says.

National Award

Last January, she won the Chambliss Astronomy Achievement Student Award from the American Astronomical Society for her research at the Arecibo Observatory. This award is presented to select undergraduate and graduate students in recognition of exemplary research presented at the annual American Astronomical Society conference.

The field of astronomy is continuously expanding, and thanks to evolving technology, astronomers are able to discover things previously thought to be impossible. In the last few years, the detection of gravitational waves coming from colliding black holes created the field of gravitational wave astronomy and added a new dimension to multiwavelength astronomy observations.

Up Next

Influenced by the research she did at Arecibo, McGlasson hopes to use the tool of planetary radar to study the icy moons in our solar system. Since these moons are considerably farther away than the asteroids she was studying at Arecibo, the radar data will need to be taken from a spacecraft like Cassini or the upcoming Europa Clipper mission.

And as she applies to PhD programs in astronomy, she imagines the discoveries that will unfold in the years ahead. Maybe it won’t happen in the next decade, but McGlasson suspects it may not be unreasonable to find evidence of life outside of Earth within her lifetime: “I am most excited about the upcoming planetary missions that will launch in the next 20 years.”

Where is all started: Firecracker First-Years