The EAO Outreach Team was thrilled to be invited to help out at the 2018 STEM Fest event held in Waimea at the Kahilu Town Hall for Big Island Girl Scouts. The event, attended by 75 girls on November 17th, provided the opportunity to experience hands on activities from a variety of science and engineering fields.
JCMT staff members Alexis Achohido and Mimi Fuchs worked with Girl Scouts to discover how astronomers know what stars are made of. In particular we highlighted the work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who proposed a theory for the composition of stars in her 1925, her PhD Thesis!
As well as looking at what stars are made of we also looked at what dense interstellar dust clouds are made of and made our very own candy molecules.
