Astronomy & Astrophysics Research Day

Explore space science with museum researchers, citizen science projects, and local astronomy club demonstrations.

The NC Museum of Natural Sciences is a research-based museum with Museum staff who conduct novel research and steward our collections. Our Research Highlight Days feature these researchers and their fields of study. This event will be held on the first and third floors of the Nature Research Center. Join us as we celebrate Astronomy and Astrophysics Research at this event! Exhibits and Activities Spiral Graph: Cluster Buster We will demonstrate and discuss Spiral Graph: Cluster Buster, our online citizen science project dedicated to identifying individual arms in spiral galaxies and measuring their winding. The degree of winding serves as a proxy for properties such as the mass of the dark matter halo and the mass of the black hole found in a galaxy’s nucleus. Our goal is to find galaxies that will help us understand the co-formation and co-evolution of spiral galaxies and their central supermassive black holes. Raleigh Astronomy Club RAC will have a table with astronomy related handouts and will answer questions about astronomy and telescopes. Astrophysics Research Highlights This table will showcase new student research by undergraduates in Physics & Astronomy at Appalachian State University. 3rd Floor Visitors from Space: Meteorites from Asteroids, the Moon, and Mars We will showcase several meteorites from the Museum collection, including new samples from the asteroid belt, the Moon, and Mars. 3rd Floor