A rock act that's out of this world?

By SHEENA McFARLAND
Thursday, March 22, 2007

Art Garfunkel or Ringo Starr may soon have a star floating in the heavens if a Weber State University student has his way.

"I'm thinking of naming it after a rock star, someone who is under-appreciated," said Michael Malmrose, the 21-year-old senior who discovered a previously unknown star.

Usually, the International Astronomical Union simply assigns numbers to new discoveries.

But that hasn't made Malmrose any less excited about his find, a result not of night after night of stargazing, but rather day after day of computer programming.

The physics major in January 2004 started working with Stacy Palen, an assistant physics professor, and other students in analyzing Australian data from the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy neighboring the Milky Way, to identify previously undiscovered stars. The first method used wasn't working properly, so Malmrose wrote computer programming last summer to process the data in a new way.

The program worked.

Malmrose studied two stars orbiting each other. He knew there were two stars because when one passed in front of the other, it blocked its light. However, the computer program predicted different timing for the blockage than what was actually occurring, so Malmrose realized there must be a third object orbiting the two stars.

The program he designed measured the minimum mass of the stars, but he remained confused because the mass of the unseen object didn't make sense.

That's when Palen had an "ah ha!" moment.

"I literally woke up at 3 a.m., and said, 'Oh! Oh!' and I got out of bed and wrote Michael an e-mail so I wouldn't forget my idea," Palen said. "By the next afternoon he fixed the code and we got real results that were interesting to look at."

Malmrose is working on a paper on the method of the star's discovery. He hopes to finish before he graduates this May and have it published in a peer-reviewed astrophysical journal to lend legitimacy to his find.

Palen says the next steps are to continue analyzing data, and eventually make it to a Southern Hemisphere observatory to see the Large Magellanic Cloud to get a better determination of the actual mass of the stars. She also hopes to make the method widely available so others can process their own data.

Malmrose, who wants to one day become a professor and researcher, likely in astrophysics, said he values the ability to do something new.

"Usually you're working on textbook problems that have been solved by everyone who has taken a physics class," he said. "With this, I got to work on a problem no one has worked on before and I got to be the first one to know the answer to the question."

Now only one question remains: Garfunkel or Ringo?