10-Year-Old Boy Discovers 600-Million-Year-Old Supernova

minty3 writes "Nathan Gray, 10, from Nova Scotia, Canada, recently discovered a 600-million-year-old supernova in the galaxy PGC 61330, which lies in the constellation of Draco – beating his sister by 33 days as the youngest person to find a supernova. Gray made the discovery on October 30 while looking at astronomical images taken by Dave Lane, who runs the Abbey Ridge Observatory (ARO) in Nova Scotia. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada confirmed Gray's discovery, but astronomers with the International Astronomical Union say they will need to use a larger telescope to make the finding official."

Comments

A great example for kids

[cold fjord]

I hope this gets shared widely in school science classes and among the home schooled.

Science is open to people of all ages.

Re:A great example for kids

[billakay]

I hope this gets shared widely in school science classes and among the home schooled.

In my experience most of the home-drooled kids get only a very basic bit of science because it's likely to interfere with the wacky creationist/survivalist ideas of their parents.

This is a vile stereotype that doesn't deserve to be propagated. I say this as a home-schooled person currently enrolled in a Computer Science Ph.D. program at a well known state university.

Re:A great example for kids

[krelvin]

Perhaps you are more the exception than the rule here?

Re:A great example for kids

[PPH]

I think you are confusing self-directed post graduate study with the K-12 home schooling sometimes abused to keep kids away from mainstream curriculum. Not all home schooling is abused this way. But often enough that its a stereotype I'd hate to mark a kid with unless he/she was exceptional* in some way to demonstrate accomplishments beyond the mean.

*Yeah, I know. All our kids are above average.

Re:A great example for kids

[Lumpy]

Nope. It is shown that home schooled and private school kids get a far higher education overall. Now the people that are interested in control whine that they dont get the proper exposure to liberal/conservative "values" but that is nothing but raging by the extremists on both sides. Parents do tend to cherry pick, but that flushes out when they hit college.

Re:A great example for kids

[ganjadude]

says the coward with no proof backing his claim?

http://blog.writeathome.com/index.php/2012/03/homeschool-vs-public-school-statistics-infographic/

Take a look at the info graph - yes it is sourced.

Re:A great example for kids

[gstoddart]

I can out code review even a PHD in CS

Well, in fairness, by the time someone has a PhD in CS they are so removed from things like code reviews it's not funny.

Some of the worst programmers I've met in my life had a Masters in CS. Some of them couldn't really program at all, which often made me wonder how the hell they'd gotten a Masters degree. Because they'd clearly never learned some of the stuff I'd have expected them to have learned in an undergraduate degree.

At a certain point, CS has nothing at all to do with writing code, and is more like abstract math. And I've known several CS professors who hadn't written any code in literally years, and more than a few who never actually wrote code professionally.

Don't underestimate the extent to which the more letters after your name, the more your knowledge is limited to the purely theoretical or only your research area. That's not to say everybody with an MSc or PhD in CS suffers from this -- but I know I'm not alone in having seen examples of people who do.

Re:A great example for kids

[Anonymous Coward]

I say this as a home-schooled person currently enrolled in a Computer Science Ph.D. program at a well known state university.

I know a home-schooled person who's a grad student in computer science at a state university. He's a creationist and he insisted on his child being born in his apartment and not at the hospital. So I don't think being a wacky creationist/survivalist is mutually exclusive from being a grad student in computer science.

Re:A great example for kids

[TheCarp]

> make up a disproportionate amount of those against public schooling

However you don't have to be against public schooling to be against sending your own kids to public schools in your area. I would wager many people who home school are in favor of public education, just not what is available to them.

My own sister does this, and isn't any sort of creationist or religious zealot. Instead she says things like "He can't be mainstreamed"; which I am still trying to decipher the meaning of, but I am sure has nothing to do with creationism since she has never expressed a religious thought in the years I have known her, and, he doesn't have any familiarity with Bible stories to the point I had to explain some to him so he would understand other cultural references*

(* The chapter title in some video game he was talking about was "Fratricide" and he was shocked I knew the word; and I was shocked he didn't know the story of Caine and Able, afterall, its only one of the most referenced stories in western litterature )

Re:A great example for kids

[cusco]

I think it varies greatly depending on the area. Here in Seattle the local school system is very supportive of the home school families, providing suggested curricula, phys ed classes, and making available space where the home-school students can socialize. In Louisiana, where my niece lives, pretty much all the home school families are ultra-conservative religious fanatics who think even the pitiful LA school system is too liberal. Dunno the situation in Nova Scotia.

Re:A great example for kids

[Vanderhoth]

Got you beat, 100% of the home schooled kids I know are completely normal well adjusted people with no wacky parents. I have a decent sampling, five from one family, three of which are attending university now, belong to the guy in the cubical next to me who insisted on home schooling because of the public school systems race to the bottom in terms of increasing class sizes combined with the no-one left behind mentality. He wanted to make sure his kids weren't getting pulled down because teachers in public school have to cater to the lowest common detonator. Which by the way is a huge issue because if you're stuck in a class with a bunch of morons, in most cases, you're stuck with them until you graduate high school, meaning they will always be pulling you and the rest of the class down.

I've also mentored thirteen students, four of which were home schooled, as part of the co-op program my company participates in with two separate universities. In all four cases I couldn't tell the students were home schooled until they, or I, specifically brought it up. In most cases they were much brighter and better adjusted socially then the other nine public school students I've mentored.

The first time I had a co-op student tell me they were home schooled I was shocked because they were such a polar opposite to what I had always thought a home schooled person to be. This is a case where a harmful stereotype is wrong and can have very negative implications to anyone willing to admit they were home schooled. Before mentoring in a co-op interview if someone mentioned they were home schooled I would have put a mental black mark on them and if it came down to them and someone equally qualified, I would have gone with the other candidate.

I suspect there are several reasons the stereotype is propagated the least of which is because the majority of the population attended public school and

1. a) doesn't want to admit they didn't receive top quality education making them not perfect so it's easy to spread the rumor about the guy you've never met who isn't as good as you and,
2. b) is ignorant of what is actually required to be allowed to home school your kids.

The program, at least where I live, is very rigorous, regulated and takes a lot of dedication and discipline on the part of the parents and involves groups of parents that get together with a common goal to educate their kids, rather than what is commonly believed where one set of parents isolates their kid in a dark room brain washing them with religious/political doctrine. The truth is the process heavily involves several families, and requires the participation of the parents as much as the students.

So you've met *one* person who was home schooled and they were an asshole. That's probably more because they were just an asshole to begin with. I attended 12 public schools in 13 years in England, Canada and the US, public school is filled with assholes and plenty more people who were/are poorly socialized, how many home school kids do you read about walking in to a school and shooting everyone they see, and yet we apply that label to home schooled people because you met *one* bad egg. How does that even make sense!?

I'd also be willing to bet you know many more home schooled people, but they wouldn't out right tell you they were because of the negative connotations that come along with being labeled "home schooled".

Re:A great example for kids

[H0p313ss]

Dyslexics of the world, untie!

Re:A great example for kids

[Bill_the_Engineer]

It's only been reported that a higher percentage of people who are homeschooled graduate from college compared to their non-homeschooled counterparts (66.7% home schooled versus 57.5% non-homeschooled)(source: US News and World Report). Of course this only looks at homeschooled people who were accepted into college and does not take into account the entire homeschooled population. The statistics that pro-homeschool sites tout are the ones that have qualifiers in them like the us news statistic that only looked at homeschoolers that attend college. I haven't found the percentage of homeschool students that continue their education after high school equivalency.

It makes sense that homeschool do better than the overall population of public school. After all, only 2.9% (2009) of the school age children were home schooled. Their household tended to have both parents and at least one of them being a professional in a field and more than half of the homeschooled had a household income greater than $50,000/yr (2003). The traditional educational system is "burdened" by students with economic, mental or social disadvantages not found in large numbers in the homeschool population. If I limit the population of non-homeschooled students to similar demographics within the ed fast facts, I get close to the same completion percentages as the homeschooled population.

In other words: Homeschooling in of itself will not magically make you a better student. However if you were homeschooled then the odds are greater that you come from a two parent household that values an education which makes you more likely to succeed at least academically.

Re:A great example for kids

[LordLimecat]

Every graph you will find on the topic will show, in order of performance,
Public Schools
Private schools
Homeschools / Catholic schools (I forget which performs best)

If you really want to be lazy,
Good old wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling#Research

This one is a goodie-- its in a peer reviewed journal, shows the full demographic breakdown, and indicates that 65% of homeschool families in 2007-2008 spent less than $900 on schooling (compared to the average $9000 /pupil in public schools)-- a full quarter spent only $200-400. It also indicates that in all tests the students on average achieved 84th and above percentile.
http://contentcat.fhsu.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15732coll4/id/456 (pick "Academic achievement and.....")

If you need more, you should really just google "homeschool achievement". This isnt even news, youre just trolling at this point.

Re:A great example for kids

[jc42]

Daddy lets you look at a slideshow, spot the magically appearing star. Boy genius!

Or, to convert it from an unsubtle put-down to a more accurate description, it's a straightforward example of something that astronomers have long pointed out: Despite being one of the hardest of "hard sciences", astronomy is a field that has always made good use of interested amateurs. This is yet another of thousands of examples.

The typical explanation is that astronomers do much of their work on high-powered equipment that can give them detailed, close-up views of things out there. This is valuable research, but has the problem that such equipment typically has a tiny field of view, so astronomers often miss interesting things that are outside their tiny fields of view. Astronomy needs people doing wider-angle work, comparing images from different times (and maybe different equipment), to spot interesting things. This is often best done by amateurs with lower-powered equipment. They can report their findings to the astronomers, who can aim their high-powered tools at the coordinates to get the details. Amateurs rarely get paid, but astronomers traditionally reward them by naming discoveries after them.

An interesting extension of this in the "Zooniverse" project, ake the "Galaxy Zoo". Look it up. What they do is take images from the petabytes of data supplied by the newer telescopes, show them to volunteers, and ask them to mark various kinds of "interesting" things in the photos. Each of their projects starts with a short training session showing you one or two examples of what they're looking for. Then you dive into a string of random images, marking them up, and sending them back to the project's computers. Currently, they have a set of details in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) for people to see and mark up.

This development is interesting partly because it's aimed at amateurs with no special equipment other than a personal computer. They've got very good response, from people who want to while away a few hours looking at pretty pictures of the sky and marking them up. Astronomers have said that their volunteers have led to a lot of interesting discoveries. One of the widely-recognized examples was "Hanny's Voorwerp" (look it up ;-), which was discovered by and named for a young woman who is a Dutch school teacher. It has led to several years of work by many astronomers trying to figure out what that thing is.

So, while mocking this kid might be satisfying, it's missing an important point about how some scientific fields actually work. He's probably good enough already to contribute to this effort. As are most of the readers of slashdot.

Big Bang

[Vanderhoth]

This sounds like something Leonard Hofstadter's family would do for Christmas. The sister's going to have a terrible "Why did you always have to out do me as kids!!?" Complex.

No, 10-year-old boy's FATHER finds supernova

[TWiTfan]

10-year-old boy gets credit for it.

Re:No, 10-year-old boy's FATHER finds supernova

[VortexCortex]

I have trained OCR programs to recognize patterns. If they discover something from the data I give them, do I not take the credit?

Re:No, 10-year-old boy's FATHER finds supernova

[mythosaz]

All credit to Adam and Eve.

Re:Recently discovered almost 3 years ago

[sayno2quat]

I take that back. Slashdot editors simply linked to the old story of his sister, but did so in such a way that I thought the first article was the article that was summarized. The second link is the actual story.

Need Coffee

[RandomUsername99]

Read that as 10-Year-Old Supernova Discovers 600-Million-Year-Old Boy

Re:Need Coffee

[TWiTfan]

Now THAT would be News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters

kids today

[themushroom]

"You kids need to get away from the telescope and go outside to play!"

Re:kids today

[Jason Levine]

My mother always joked that she was the only mother in town that had to yell at her kid to stop reading and play outside. Of course, karma being what it is, I find myself trying to tell my oldest son to put his tablet computer down and play outside. I wonder what HIS kids won't want to put down when he tells them to go outside and play.

Re:Cue jealous 30-something /.ers

[sandytaru]

My team mate and I discovered that the Cepheid variable we were supposed to be studying in astronomy back in 1998 was actually a binary star system. The prof got credit, of course, but it was enough to make me feel as though I had Contributed To Astronomy.

So, mad props to this young man. Good on ya, kid.

Re:Recently discovered almost 3 years ago

[jones_supa]

Published on Tue Jan 04 2011

Cool story. Not exactly recent, though.

That is because before publishing, all Slashdot news go through a rigorous fact-checking and quality assurance review, which can take months or years.

Very nice Nathan, now go take a bath

[JoeyRox]

And make sure you clean up your toys before going to bed.

Home schooled is better

[Okian Warrior]

From the Wikipedia article on Home Schooling:

.) "A study conducted in 2008 found that 11,739 home schooled students, on average, scored 37 percentile points above public school students on standardized achievement tests."

This quote, with references, is cited among many studies that note essentially the same thing.

What's that? Did you say something about socialization? From the same article:

.)"[The researchers] later found, using the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale, "while half of the conventionally schooled children scored at or below the 50th percentile (in self-concept), only 10.3% of the home-schooling children did so."

I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear your next question: are you talking about costs? From the same article:

)."[...] home educators expend only an average of $500–$600 a year on each student, in comparison to $9,000-$10,000 for each public school student in the United States, which suggests home-educated students would be especially dominant on tests if afforded access to an equal commitment of tax-funded educational resources."

The take-away is that home schooling will give your kids a better chance of having a successful life. Much, *much* better, based on the scores. Another way to think about it is that public schooling impedes and retards your child's development, and makes them less fit to compete in the arena of life.

(Pro tip: ten seconds of research will save you 5 minutes of posting, and as a side-effect prevent you from putting your foot in your mouth.)

Re:Sibling rivalry?

[Valdrax]

Instead of being happy for him and his achievement, his sister will probably put boogers on his pillow. He's 10, he probably does that to her anyway.

And well she should! Stupid younger siblings, always getting the same privileges as the older sibling at a younger age because it "wouldn't be fair."

"Hey, Mom and Dad, can use the telescope to break a record for girls in science?
"Sure thing, dear."
"I wanna use it too!"
"Okay, you can go after your sister."
"But Mooooom, you wouldn't let me make any scientific discoveries until I was twelve!"

(Not that I have a grudge or anything!)

You're guessing

[Okian Warrior]

Home school children probably succeed more so because of parent involvement than homeschooling itself. Comparing home schooled children to all of public schools is disingenuous, the demographics won't even come close to aligning.

You're guessing.

We (scientists, that is) have two situations completely described, with strong objective evidence that one is better.

You (anonymous coward on the internet) suggest that it "might" be due to something that furthers your own beliefs.

Cite some studies or shut up. If you think "more studies need to happen", then that's a weak argument: since the original study included almost 12,000 test cases, you'll need a much larger study to show that your assertion is valid, but wasn't shown in the original study due to random chance. Let us know when you're done.

In the mean time, feel free to send your kid to public school. Mine is home-schooled and I want to give him as much of an edge as possible.

No, really: send your kid to public school, do us all a favor. This problem will sort itself out in a generation or two.

33 days

[Jonathunder]

"...beating his sister by 33 days as the youngest person to find a supernova."

If he's 33 days younger than his sister, their mom had a rough couple of months.

Ho-hum

[Roblimo]

"10-Year-Old Boy Discovers 600-Million-Year-Old Supernova" is a "Dog Bites Man" story. "600-Million-Year-Old Boy Discovers 10-Year-Old Supernova" would be serious real news. Wow!

Re:Ho-hum

[Nemyst]

A 10 year old supernova would likely spell our doom, actually...

I cannot believe....

[DaveLaneCA]

I really cannot believe the "garbage" that is getting posted here as comments to this news item. And no, I'm not just a "reader" ... I am part of the story as it is my backyear observatory that provides the images, both for Nathan and for his sister Kathryn and before that for others. We have discovered 5 in total. Providing opportunities for youth in science is one of the things I do - in this way and in many others ways (but principally through astronomy. What have you done today with your energy for the betteremnt of future scientists and technology professionals? (oh, of course, you trashed an achievement made by a bright kid that through this attention will probably have a brighter future, despite the critics. --- Dave Lane