The East Meadow School District is proud to announce that W.T. Clarke High School senior Ganesh Ravichandran has been named a semifinalist in the 2014 Intel Science Talent Search Competition, the nation’s oldest and most prestigious pre-college science competition. As one of 300 students selected for this honor, Ganesh will receive a $1,000 award for his research. The school will also receive a $1,000 award toward its science research program.
For his astronomy project, titled “Close Companions to Kepler Objects of Interest: Results from a Large Adaptive Optics Survey,” Ganesh worked over the course of two summers with a team of researchers led by graduate student Timothy Morton at the California Institute of Technology’s John Johnson Exoplanets Laboratory. He also worked with his mentor, Clarke High School research and biology teacher Erika Rotolo.
The team used data from Robo-AO, a camera system, to make a catalog of stars in the galaxy that could have orbiting planets. Though the camera system recently captured images of potential planet-hosting stars using data from NASA’s Kepler space observation mission, Ganesh said that the issue with NASA’s data is that some stars don’t have exoplanets because they are “false positives.”
Ganesh explained that Morton created a false positive probability analysis to determine the chance that a signal is from a planet or a false positive. For his part, Ganesh developed software to analyze the Robo-AO images. “My goal was to design
a computer program that sifted through them manually to find coordinates of all the different stars,” he said. Ganesh then sent his findings to Morton for his analysis.
On being named a semifinalist, Ganesh said he was honored, and he enjoyed his research experience. “I was really excited,” he said. “Doing the research was the most fun thing about it — the research is the most important thing.”
Ganesh would like to pursue a degree in either physics or economics.
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