“The twenty-first century,” says student Michael Clark after the satisfying snap of a 3-D printed telescope attachment.
He, alongside about 15 other LBCC students, was preparing on Thursday, April 4, to travel with astronomy equipment to Texas to observe the solar eclipse and perform the “Modern Eddington Experiment”, proving Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
For 15 weeks they learned the history of the Eddington experiment, how it was being modified to improve its accessibility, how to use the equipment, and running “dress rehearsals” of the process they’ll need to do during the two minutes of totality (total eclipse of the sun by the moon) on Monday, April 8.
The project began after Toby Dittrich, Portland Community College faculty, and Richard Berry, a local astronomer, worked with a group of students to recreate Arthur Eddingtons’ 1919 experiment, which proved Albert Einstein’s 1906 theory of relativity. The goal of Eddington’s experiment was to find deflection of light caused by the warping of space-time by the sun’s gravitational pull.
While useful, this experiment was done with a very large telescope, and minimal technology such as silvered plates. Dittrich and Berry wanted to make this experiment more accessible to the public and modernize it. Back in 2017, Berry, Dittrich, and Don Bruns, PhD, from San Diego, alongside a group of students performed the experiment successfully and Bruns even published a paper about it.
Still, there were some improvements to be made to the experiment. The process was complex and used a couple dozen or so programs to analyze the data captured. At this point Dittrich contacted LBCC physics faculty Heather Hill to assist in simplifying the process and increasing its accessibility.
Hill was awarded a $15,000 grant for her and two students to write open source computer programming in summer of 2022 that is still in the works and not ready to be used. Hill said, “We’re planning to continue to work on them and have them ready for the next eclipse that’s going to be occurring in Egypt in 2027.”
For the 2024 eclipse, a group of LBCC students and LBCC faculty are traveling to Leaky, Texas with a telescope with a very high powered camera and will be trying to perform the Eddington experiment. The students, recruited by physics instructor Greg Mulder, will be performing the experiment with largely borrowed equipment.
Hill explained, “What we really want is images slightly to the left, and slightly to the right of the sun so that we can see how the starlight behind the sun is being deflected. The best time to do this is during an eclipse because we don’t have all the light from the sun overexposing the view and making it so you can’t see the starlight behind.
“The students have practiced manipulating the telescope in order to get these images during totality, which is only about two minutes. Also, when you’re normally looking at the sun with a telescope you need to have a solar filter on. During these two minutes we will be taking the solar filter off and taking these images and it’s important not to have the high intensity sunlight to go into the telescope because it can ruin the optics of the telescope and the camera. So, we will be taking that filter off, doing all of our data collection, and before totality ends putting that filter back on.
“Also, before the experiment we’re taking images of the sky without the sun being present, where the stars will not have any deflection due to the sun. We’ll be able to compare the stars’ real position relative to other stars when there’s no sun to when there is the sun and the starlight has been deflected.
“That deflection shows that Einstein was right about general relativity that heavy massive objects do gravitationally warp space time and therefore warp light.”
The trip itself is a grant project funded with $20,000 from NASA through the Oregon Space Grant Consortium for equipment and travel for an LBCC team to attempt to measure effects predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity that are visible during solar eclipses, Mulder wrote in an email. The goal is “to create a system that any high school, two-year college, or just an amateur astronomer could use to measure the curvature of space-time behind the sun.”
“We can’t see the sun pushing into the fifth dimension because the sun is so bright, but every now-and-again our moon comes up and blocks out the sunlight and that allows us to see what’s going on behind the sun.
“When the sun is pushing into the fifth dimension, it means that from our point of view the stars behind it appear to be a little bit closer to each other than they usually are when the sun’s not there. So that’s our goal is we’ve made a couple systems; we’ve made the skip system and then we’re creating a system which goes on a normal telescope, and both those systems will hopefully be able to take pictures of the stars behind the sun during the time that the sun is eclipsed.”
The last meeting of the students on Thursday was different from the intense previous 15 weeks, beginning with unboxing LBCC Solar Eclipse Trip t-shirts designed by student Rose Smith. Most students meandered into groups and chatted about the shirts and the plane tickets. The work still wasn’t over though as students Michael Clark and Sarah Leathers made last-minute adjustments to equipment.
“We can do it on the plane, we’re done with hardware, it’s just software,” said Clark.
Leathers explained the attachment she had been working on: “We are making a camera that takes pictures while a linear polarizer rotates in front of it. We’re taking pictures of the sun through that to see how light from the sun is polarized through it.”
Leathers explained the dual set-up, “The plan was to build one, but it wasn’t going well so we made another. We might end up with two.”
(One of the devices described by Sarah Leathers, taken by me)
(Area where Michael Clark and Sarah Leathers were working, taken by me)
