Leader News Stars Align for Troischt Over Summer

A Hawks in Flight Feature

It’s been an exciting summer for Professor of Physics Parker Troischt.

“In August, just a few days before I started my FlightPath course, ‘Search For Life in The Universe,’ they discovered carbon dioxide on one of the exoplanets for the first time,” he says. “It’s one of the things you look for when you look for whether or not a planet may be habitable, so I got to share that with my students.”

Troischt was also able to once again take Hartwick students Nicholas Volk ’23, MacKenzie Rowe ’23, and Tristani Makharashvili ’24 on a summer research trip to West Virginia to the Green Bank Telescope, the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. It had been closed to outside research groups during the pandemic.

The group was part of a team – called ALFALFA, or Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA – made up of professors and students from colleges and universities including Cornell, Union, Providence and St. Lawrence. They spent a week in June observing galaxies where supernovae have occurred as they continue collecting data that will be used to determine accurate distances to galaxies. When the project is finished, a total of 220 galaxies with supernovae will be observed. The project is funded by a grant from National Science Foundation (NSF).

“It’s one thing to look at a data map,” says Volk. “But when you get to use the tools others have used to collect that data, you get a much better sense of what you’re really looking at. It was a really cool opportunity to get that hands-on experience.”

And Troischt also finally let himself look at images from the James Webb Space Telescope. “I couldn’t watch any of the launch stuff – I was too nervous!” he admits. “There was too much at stake. Then the images started coming in and they were spectacular.”

He even set one of the images of Jupiter as his computer wallpaper. “I was blown away when I saw this image,” he says. “It’s not CGI. It’s really Jupiter. All those details are real.”