Grade 9 student Jarek Osika, Flin Flon’s foremost young astronomer, has added another award to his mantle for his work with radio telescope technology.
Osika’s project, “Radio Eyes - Blackhole Hunter,” made a splash at the Canada-wide Science Fair in Fredericton, N.B. earlier this month, receiving the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) Physics Prize. The award comes with a reward valued at $750.
“I think I did good for my standards,” said Osika, who has represented Flin Flon in three consecutive Canada-wide Science Fairs, winning awards in astronomy for his previous projects.
“I didn’t think I was going to get the physics one. I was expecting something with astronomy. I was pretty surprised.”
Osika’s 2019 project is an extension of his previous work regarding the construction, design and findings of radio telescopes, specialized scientific tools that record signs of astronomic activity far away from the earth. This year, Osika built an interferometer using a telescope and radio to detect Cygnus A, a black hole galaxy more than 600 million light years away from Earth.
“Last year, I compared two different antennas, like a horn and dish antenna. For this year, I built an interferometer to look at a black hole. An interferometer is two or more dishes put together to act like a larger one,” he said.
“Cygnus A is a supermassive black hole that’s 600 million light years away from Earth. It is one of the biggest radio sources in the sky and it’s in the swan [Cygnus] constellation. They don’t quite know what it is yet and they think it’s either two binary black holes or some kind of supermassive black hole.”
During the visit for the fair, Osika met with members of the Canadian Centre for Experimental Radio Astronomy. He first became acquainted with members of the group last year during the national fair.
Osika plans to submit science fair projects throughout the remainder of his high school years. However, his future plans are up in the air both for what he may study next and what he hopes to do following high school.
“I don’t really know what I’m going to do next year, but I have a couple of other dishes that I could experiment with,” he said before mentioning his future goals.
“That’s still something that I’d like to plan out. I would like to do something with physics – physics or space.”
Osika will take Grade 11 physics classes next year.
“This year, I want to try to start a little bit more closer to the summer because Cygnus A, like the black hole that I’m looking at, comes into view more in the summer than in the winter,” he said.
