A large, nondescript blob emerged out of white noise on a computer screen, and there it was, Galaxy AGC310842, an astronomer’s dream.
George Mason University junior Lisa Horne discovered a galaxy no one had spotted during just her second session searching data from the world’s largest telescope.
“I had been told that people at that level of research find things regularly, but I never thought that in my first two days, I would find something,” Horne said.
Below the galaxy’s boring, formal name is a subtitle tribute to the 20-year-old sky searcher from Roanoke who found it: “Lisa H.”
In the six months since she found it last summer, she has been searching for more firsts, awaiting verification on a number of “clumps” and “blobs” that may have escaped notice for years.
The story of a how a college student turned a laptop in suburban Virginia into a gateway to outer space is a marvel of modern technology and the result of a project designed to find and catalogue 25,000 galaxies.
An enormous telescope in Puerto Rico produces data that have to be analyzed by researchers. Most of Horne’s work comes from telescope surveys in 2006 that unearthed images that had yet to be thoroughly perused for more stars.
About half of the galaxies will be new discoveries, like “Lisa H,” said professor Jessica Rosenberg, Horne’s mentor at George Mason. “There are way too many objects to give names.”
Astronomy was an early draw for Horne, who picked her college in part because of its astronomy program, and joined a local astronomy club’s star-gazing nights as a child.
About eight to 12 hours a week, she plugs into the telescope feed of radio wavelengths as part of a study based out of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., which is mapping the universe beyond the Milky Way. The program’s leaders verified Horne’s galaxy.
“There aren’t many students who get this opportunity to make discoveries,” Rosenberg said. “We get to ask about the universe and try to understand basically how the universe got to be.”
