BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Illinois Wesleyan University junior Derrick Rohl has been accepted into the Research Experience for Undergraduates Program (REU) of the National Science Foundation.
Rohl, a physics major from Glen Ellyn, Ill., will spend January to March of 2011 conducting research at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in La Serena, Chile. His research, supervised by Illinois Wesleyan Professor of Physics Linda French, focuses on Trojan asteroids, which revolve around the sun in the same orbit as Jupiter.
It will be Rohl’s second trip to Chile. He visited Cerro Tololo this summer for a seven-night observing run with Sue Lederer of NASA to collect images of the asteroids. “We are looking at how the asteroids rotate,” said Rohl, who took hundreds of images at one of the telescopes in Chile. “On campus, I spend time measuring the brightness of the asteroids in our images to produce light curves, which let us see how fast each asteroid is spinning.”
Rohl’s research with French and Lederer was presented at a conference in California this fall.