Hands-On Astronomy

If you are anything like me, you have become accustomed to thinking of science as Big Science: science produced by NASA, JPL, and large universities and institutes all around the world. Well, I recently watched a fascinating documentary about a friend of mine, astronomer Larry Molnar, a professor at Calvin University, a small Christian liberal arts school in Michigan.

Larry has put the “t” in teaching, involving his undergraduate students in some serious hands-on study of contact binary stars—specifically, seeing if they can predict when binary system KIC 9832227 might come together and light up in a nova. (Prior to their work, novae could never be predicted more closely than “This star could erupt any time in the next ten thousand years.”) Does their prediction pan out? Watch the documentary to see.

The film is called Luminous, and was shot over the course of five years. It lets you see science as it actually is done, complete with frustration and disappointment, and success or failure hinging on uncertain data points. It touches a bit on Larry’s faith, just enough to highlight the fact that one can both have spiritual faith and do solid science. (On a personal note, when I saw them doing research at the University of Wyoming’s WIRO Observatory, it gave me a flashback. I spent some time at that observatory when I attended the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop in 2007.)

You can stream Luminous from a variety of sources, including Kanopy or Hoopla via your public library, the Roku channel—or for a few dollars, from most of the popular streaming sites like Apple+ and Prime (see Luminous for links).

We’ve known Larry and his amazing wife Cindy for something over thirty years, dating back to our attending the same church in Cambridge, Mass., and trading babysitting when our kids were very young. Larry was a postdoc at Harvard then. He helped me with brainstorming the science in my novel From a Changeling Star. We recently got to see them for the first time in many years! Here are Larry and Cindy, our mutual friend Peggy, and Allysen and me.