Gold Medal Members

Image courtesy Sharmin Chowdhury

Congratulations to Aidan Aird, Mélanie Seabrook and Emma Seabrook on winning gold medals last weekend in the York Region Science and Technology Fair.  

Mélanie Seabrook and Emma Seabrook's poster was on exoplanets. "Finding Planets Orbiting Other Stars; Does Size Matter?".  

As described in the abstract "In the last twenty years, there has been a growing interest in finding planets that lie outside of our solar system. They are called “exoplanets”. For the past two years, we have been observing the night sky as members of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, and have taken a keen interest to exoplanets. We wondered if one could measure an exoplanet transit from Earth and if so, how would the size ratio of the exoplanet to its parent star affects the dip in brightness. Using the transit photometry method, we coordinated transit observations and generated the light curves of four exoplanets to determine the correlation between the planet’s size and the dips in brightness recorded. Our results show that if the planet and the parent star are closer in size, then the transit depth will be bigger....."

Data was collected with assistance from President Paul Mortfield using his Californian telescope.

Aidan Aird, for the fourth year in a row, also won a gold medal and will be representing York Region at the Canada-wide science fair in New Brunswick.  His project was on "The Multi-Functional Water Wheel Cart for Developing Nations".

Well done all!