Amazing opportunity for High Schoolers

The NCSciFest has more virtual offerings than ever. This one for high schoolers caught my eye – a chance to work with experts from University of California-Berkeley, plus meet with a Duke scientist.

Register now and pass it on! Best, Jonathan

DESI High: School of the Dark Universe is open for students!  DESI will observe 30 million galaxies over the next five years to finally determine why our expanding Universe suddenly decided to accelerate.  Since its first discovery, we’ve learned that up to 70% of our Universe is made of this mysterious Dark Energy, but otherwise we know very little about it!

DESI High provides K9-12 with hot-off-the-telescope DESI data for galaxies, stars, white dwarves and much more.  Come learn everything there is to know about Dark Energy, python coding & data science then run your own experiments!  This may be the beginning of your very own journey to finally understand the nature of Dark Energy, Dark Matter and the first moments in the life of our Universe.

Three events in one!  

– What is DESI and Dark Energy?:  We’ll begin our event with a short ~25 min. introductory talk about Cosmology and the DESI experiment, followed by a quick Q&A.  This will run in collaboration with Duke University's own Michael Troxel, Assistant Professor of Dark Energy and Weak Lensing.  

– Meet a Scientist!:  Students and their families will be split amongst individual Zoom breakout rooms where they can meet a scientist! Each scientist will give a brief introduction to themselves, their science, how they got started in Astronomy and much else.

– Start your Data Science adventure:  In the final and main section, students will be introduced to DESI High: a series of Jupyter notebooks that contain experiments with hot-off-the-telescope DESI data!  Everything is free and only an internet connection is required to get started. DESI scientists will be on hand to provide technical support and answer questions.

Pre-registration required:  

https://pkmhafcnwvk.typeform.com/to/g2Y7Qagn