The group will use the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a large automated survey in 5 colors, to search for objects that might be 'orphan afterglows' of the stellar explosions that produce gamma ray bursts (GRB), intense short-lived bursts of gamma rays. The gamma rays are so intense, and arrive over such a short time, that they are probably concentrated into a narrow beam. When the beam is not pointed in our direction, we would see an optical brightening but no gamma rays: an 'orphan afterglow'. Dr. McNamara's group will concentrate on 300 square degrees of the sky to which the SDSS telescope has returned every few nights over many months. They will examine the SDSS database of objects that have been found to brighten rapidly, and examine automatically which of these resemble the optical behavior of known gamma-ray bursts, but without any accompanying gamma rays. The group estimates that if the currently-popular 'fireball' model is correct, they should find roughly 20 orphan afterglows. Failure to detect any orphan afterglows would indicate serious problems with the model.
Dr. McNamara is on the faculty of one of the six Hispanic-Serving Institutions that are also Research I universities. The group plans to involve at least 2 students from under-represented minorities each year in this research, and it has a strong record of such mentorship. Dr. McNamara is involved in an effort at New Mexico State University that provides after-school programs to K-12 students from under-represented minorities, and he has developed distance-education classes for K-8 teachers. For the teachers, he will develop lesson plans incorporating New Mexico's public school standards that allow students to identify prominent variable astronomical objects.
