Canadian Astronomical Society (CASCA)
Société canadienne d'astronomie (CASCA)

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John R. PERCY
University of Toronto at Mississauga

Variable Stars: Dynamic Tools for Hands-On Astronomy and Physics Education

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Variable stars are stars which change in brightness. They provide important information about the nature and evolution of the stars. I will share my experience in supervising research projects on variable stars by senior high school and undergraduate students. These projects introduce students to most of the basic aspects of the research process. In the course of their background reading, they encounter a variety of fundamental concepts in the physical sciences. Time-series analysis of variable star data then introduces them to further concepts in math, statistics, and computation. Students are motivated by doing real science, with real data! Almost every project results in a published research paper or conference presentation. Hands-On Astrophysics (hoa.aavso.org), which was developed by Janet Mattei and me, is a related project which was targeted at high school students. My students have created a simple web page (www.astro.utoronto.ca/~percy/index.html) with information and links to software and data, to support individual student research projects. Recently, as a result of massive sky surveys, thousands of new variable stars have been discovered -- but not yet analyzed. Since most of the data is available on-line, there is a golden opportunity for students to "solve" these stars.