How do you find a needle in a galactic haystack? Fronefield Crawford is harnessing the computational strength of F&M’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) cluster to pinpoint the location of rotating stars in our neighboring galaxies.

“Radio pulsars are compact rotating stars that emit radio waves as pulses that can be detected with large radio telescopes,” said Crawford, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Physics and Astronomy. “These signals are generally very faint, and sophisticated analysis packages must be applied to detect them.”

F&M’s HPC cluster provides the vital capacity for Crawford to process the massive datasets required to find these signals. This technology completes in a single week a task that once spanned months.

“These are deep, sensitive observations that are quite long and require a lot of computational time to analyze,” Crawford said. “The cluster has greatly sped up the time it takes to do this sort of searching.”

Crawford enlists students on his quest to map the cosmos, offering his undergraduate mentees a distinctive opportunity to experience innovative technology firsthand while researching alongside a faculty expert. Students like Haunah Thomas, a double major in astrophysics and English (creative writing), sift through the cluster’s processed data to locate promising signals. Crawford’s galactic exploration even went global when he took Thomas and a team of student researchers to Japan to collaborate with peers at Kumamoto University in Kumamoto.

“It’s been exciting to see what science actually looks like,” Thomas said. “Not just in textbooks and manufactured labs, where there’s a result you’re supposed to get. It’s exciting to see that we don’t know exactly what the data is going to reveal.”

Student Research at F&M

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