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February 8th, 2015 5:52 pm by Rick Wagner

KINGSPORT A future Carl Sagan or two may come from the ranks of local high school graduates in years to come.

But these future astronomers, would-be hosts of something like the late Sagans PBS television series Cosmos, are unlike astronomer and author Sagan was in at least one way.

They are females.

Sullivan South High School senior Kayla Jenkins and astronomy teacher Thomas Rutherford recently presented some of their NASA-commissioned research at a national astronomy conference in Seattle.

The research anoutgrowth of a project started in 2013 is using the red shiftin light from a type of black hole called an active galactic nuclei. That is among the brightest of objects in the universe.

Using a color magnitude measurement graphing color versus brightness from quasars and type 1 Seyfert galaxies, the research examined about 11,000 objects.

Jenkins did another project on seeking to calculate the distance to an open star cluster. A third project, still underway with a friend, is to measure the distance from the earth to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy using globular clusters,

The red shift research is for a NASA-funded program called NITARP, which stands for NASA/Infrared Processing and Analysis Center Teacher Archive Research Project.

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Sullivan South student working on path to astronomy career