Photo by Jerry Sowden - Oil City High School science teacher Timothy Spuck stands next to a poster documenting the findings of research he and other high school teachers and students conducted using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The research team found a dozen newly formed stars in a section of the Witch Head Nebula, nearly quadrupling the number of known stars in the region. The group is conducting further research searching for more baby stars.

From the time he was very young, Oil City High School science teacher Timothy Spuck wanted to be an astronaut.

While that dream has not literally come true, he has managed to hitch a ride, as it were, on NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and take several of his students along on a journey of discovery that has uncovered newborn stars in the Witch Head Nebula.

The research opportunity was made possible through the Spitzer Space Telescope Research Program for Teachers and Students. Spuck is one of 12 high school teachers from across the country - the only one from Pennsylvania - selected to participate in the program.

Recent Oil City graduates Brittany Ehrhart and David Bowser II were part of the team that traveled last summer to the Spitzer Science Center at California Institute of Technology to analyze and compile the data collected during the team's initial observations with the Spitzer Telescope conducted in early 2005. They were two of five high school students involved in the project.

Later this summer, two more Oil City students, Sandy Weiser and Matt Heath, will accompany Spuck to the Spitzer Science Center, operated for NASA by Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to help process additional data collected with the Spitzer telescope in March.

The project

The Spitzer Space Telescope, launched in 2003, is the final piece in NASA's Great Observatories Program - which includes four orbiting observatories capable of viewing the universe in different kinds of light - visible light (the Hubble Space Telescope), gamma rays (the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory), X-rays (the Chandra X-Ray Observatory) and infared (Spitzer).

Spitzer obtains images by detecting the infared energy (or heat) radiated by objects in space, according to the Spitzer web site at www.spitzer.caltech.edu.

When Spuck and the other teachers involved in the Spitzer program first gathered together, they learned about the uses of infared astronomy and then formed teams based on their research interests. Spuck's team wanted to study star formation and newly formed stars. The study of young, low-mass stars still in the process of formation, known as T-Tauri stars, which are about the size of the sun, can provide "a better idea of what our origins were," Spuck said.

The team was paired with a professional astronomer, Luisa Rebull of the Spitzer Science Center, and after discussing several possible targets for observation, they settled on a portion of the Witch Head Nebula as a likely incubator of baby stars and made a proposal for time on the Spitzer telescope.

While the researchers do not operate the Spitzer telescope, if their projects are approved they provide the instructions for the observations, Spuck said.

The little-studied Witch Head Nebula is a cloud of gas and dust located 800 light-years away in the Orion constellation. While little visible light makes its way through the dust cloud, infared technology allows astronomers to "peer through the gas and dust and see what is going on inside the cloud," Spuck explained.

Stars form inside such clouds after an "event" creates an energy wave that hits the cloud and causes it to fragment into smaller pieces, or protostars, he said. The fragments collapse under their own gravity, and as a result, their interiors become hotter and denser. If enough mass is present, a star will form in the center of the fragment when the temperature reaches 10 million degrees Kelvin and hydrogen begins fusing into helium.

The newborn stars are surrounded by telltale "cocoons" of gas and dust - that will eventually form into planets - which are visible in the infrared spectrum.

Discoveries

The team's observation with Spitzer of a small section of the Witch Head Nebula turned up 12 newly formed stars, only three of which were previously documented.

On the strength of that success, the team applied for and was granted additional time on the telescope to observe the rest of the Witch Head Nebula in search of more baby stars. Spitzer made those observations in March, and Spuck hopes that more of the T-Tauri stars will be found when the data is processed.

The team also hopes to confirm its theory that a nearby star is causing the stars to form. Rigel, a massive star (known as a supergiant) in the Orion constellation, may be giving off a solar wind that is slamming into the Witch Head Nebula and initiating the star formation process, Spuck said.

The data from the initial observation also turned up an unrelated serendipitous find, Spuck said.

By comparing their images of the nebula to others made in 1985, team members found a star that has moved during the intervening years. While all stars are moving, that movement is generally so slow that it cannot be detected, Spuck said. The discovery of a star showing "proper" (detectable) motion is rare and signifies one of two things, he said.

Either something has happened and the star is being thrown out of the galaxy, or the star is much closer than previously thought and its proximity is throwing off the calculations of its velocity, he said.

The team also will follow up on that find.

Additional research also is planned using one of the major optical telescopes to determine the "spectral signatures" of the T-Tauri stars, which will provide clues to their size and composition.

Teaching

Fueled by his lifelong interest in what lies beyond the earth's atmosphere, Spuck might well have become a professional astronomer and spent all of his time at research.

But another passion - for sharing the wonder of the night sky with others - led him down a path to becoming a high school science teacher.

"Science education is now moving toward a more authentic approach. For a lot of years, it was taught in a historical capacity - this is what science has done. My goal . . . is to allow them to get this kind of experience (of the scientific process)," he said.

"I love the 'a ha' moments, when a light turns on in a kid's head because they really understood something or have achieved something they never thought was possible."

"This is a fantastic opportunity for them to take part in something that is writing astronomical history and a great opportunity to see first-hand what it is to be a scientist," he said.

"Our young kids are capable of great things," he added. "If pushed and given the resources, they can do tremendous things."

His only regret is that more of his students could not be involved in the primary research.

When he chose Ehrhart and Bowser to help with the analysis last summer, he was looking for students he had worked with before on other astronomy projects. Ehrhart had already done some work on the Witch Head Nebula and Bowser was a member of his space science class.

For this year's trip, which like last year's will be paid for by NASA, he asked interested students to submit applications. He received nine.

"I had to whittle it down to two. It was very difficult. I wish I could have taken more," he said.

But a team of his students will be involved in other stages of the research, he said. Thanks to an agreement between the Oil Region Astronomical Society (of which Spuck is president), Clarion University's Science in Motion program and the Perth Observatory in Australia, Spuck's students already have conducted additional research on three of the T-Tauri stars uncovered in the Witch Head Nebula. They observed the stars in real time using a robotic telescope at Perth Observatory via the Internet.

Spuck explained that once the young stars are discovered using infrared, they can be observed using larger optical telescopes that can detect their very faint light.

The newly discovered stars will be added to the Spitzer Science Center archives. Spuck, Ehrhart and Bowser and the other members of the team presented their initial findings in January at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C.

Spuck and others are writing up their findings for publication, and he hopes to take a number of his students to the meeting of the American Astronomical Society next January in Seattle to present the results of the latest data.

"It's exciting to be engaged in the process of science, where you are not merely studying astronomy in a historical sense, but rather you are making the significant contributions that will one day become scientific history," he said.