Hillsdale College Students and Faculty Member Co-Author Paper on Eclipse Research
The paper featured research Hillsdale students conducted during the 2024 total solar eclipse.
HILLSDALE, Mich. — Fourteen Hillsdale College students, along with Timothy Dolch, associate professor of physics, recently co-authored a paper on radio astronomy in the Astrophysical Journal. The paper features research Hillsdale students conducted during the 2024 total solar eclipse.
“Our students have a unique opportunity to work in the field of radio astronomy, thanks to our own facilities, which are student-built, and to our collaborators,” Dolch said. “They have often published their results in peer-reviewed scientific journals as a result.”
“Our students have a unique opportunity to work in the field of radio astronomy, thanks to our own facilities, which are student-built, and to our collaborators.”
The paper, “Constraining Solar Emission Radius at 42 MHz During the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse Using a Student-Commissioned Radio Telescope,” reported on measurements taken by students in the Astronomy Club and in the LAUREATES summer research program.
The students used Hillsdale’s Deployable Low-Band Ionosphere and Transient Experiment (DLITE) to take solar measurements from within the path of totality. DLITE records radio waves, which have a lower frequency than visible light.
Ahead of the eclipse, students made several trips with Dolch to Observatory Park, Ohio, to construct the radio telescope.
The radio waves students recorded during the eclipse cannot normally be observed, and their measurements helped scientists understand what part of the sun these waves come from.
The resulting Astrophysical Journal paper included 14 Hillsdale student authors, including Emerson Sigtryggsson ’26, who recently received a posthumous physics degree from the College, and to whom the paper is dedicated.
This project, enabled by a gift from Douglas Hamilton, was a collaboration with the Naval Research Laboratory and Observatory Park, part of the Geauga Park District in Geauga County, Ohio.
Hillsdale’s LAUREATES program is an endowed program to support original summer research projects in the sciences. Students undertake high-level research projects under the direction of a faculty mentor. They typically conduct six weeks of full-time research in the early part of the summer, which they integrate into their senior theses the following academic year. Some students also give off-campus presentations at regional or national conferences.
In 2018, Hillsdale students constructed a radio telescope in the College’s Hayden Park. The telescope is the fifth station of the Low-Frequency All-Sky Monitor, a network of five radio telescopes across the country. The stations collaborate to detect solar radio bursts and other astrophysical phenomena invisible with an optical telescope.