A Star Student
MIT junior makes a big discovery
By Kathryn Beaumont

Last summer, emily Levesque '06 thought she had made a mistake. She and colleagues working at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ, had been examining stars, and the data they'd collected seemed to suggest something big--red supergiants larger than any previously documented. Each would have to have a radius about 1,500 times that of the Sun.

Such a discovery was not what Levesque had in mind when she went to the observatory as one of several student astronomers sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Research Experience for Undergraduates program. Her charge was to create a new temperature scale for red supergiants--massive stars nearing the end of their existence--using previously constructed models and the data she gathered during her nighttime observations. Levesque and the project's advisor, Philip Massey, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ, then used the new scale to determine the radii of the stars. That's how they came to the surprising conclusion that they'd found the three stars with the largest diameters among known normal stars.

Levesque subsequently compiled and analyzed the data, was lead author on a paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, and presented the findings in January at the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego--not bad for a college junior.

Such enthusiasm and initiative are perhaps not surprising in someone who was reading Stephen Hawking in middle school in Taunton, MA, and who "harassed" her father to set up the family's telescope even on cloudy nights. Already hard at work on her thesis, Levesque will compare the data from her Kitt Peak observations to temperature data she gathered from the Magellanic Clouds--nearby galaxies--in November 2004 at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.