CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A Clarksburg high school sophomore analyzing data from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope has discovered a strange type of neutron star called a rotating radio transient  -- one of only about 30 known to science.

Lucas Bolyard, a student at South Harrison High School, made the discovery while taking part in the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, a project in which West Virginia high school students are trained to scrutinize data from the giant radio telescope.

In March, after studying more than 2,000 data plots from the Green Bank telescope and finding nothing, Bolyard decided to spend some of his free time looking for anomalies.

"I was home on a weekend and had nothing to do, so I decided to look at some more plots from the GBT," he said. "I saw a plot with a pulse, but there was a lot of radio interference, too. The pulse almost got dismissed as interference."

Bolyard reported the pulse-bearing plot, expecting little to come of it. It went on a list of candidates for West Virginia University astronomers Maura McLaughlin and Duncan Lorimer to re-examine, using new observations of the region of sky from which the pulse came. But the follow-up observations showed nothing, indicating that the object was not a normal pulsar.

In July, Bolyard returned to the Green Bank Observatory with fellow Pulsar Search Collaboratory students. After observing with the telescope into the early morning hours, Lorimer showed Bolyard a new plot of his pulse, reprocessed from raw data, showing that it came from a real source, not radio interference.

The WVU astronomer told Bolyard he had likely discovered one of only about 30 objects known as rotating radio transients.

Bolyard, tired from a night of observing, said the news "made me full of energy."

Rotating radio transients are thought to be similar to pulsars -- extremely dense neutron stars that are the corpses of massive stars that exploded as supernovas. Pulsars are known for their lighthouselike beams of radio waves that sweep through space as they rotate.

While pulsars emit radio waves constantly, rotating radio transients emit only sporadically, one burst at a time, with as much as several hours between bursts, making them difficult to discover and observe. The first known rotating radio transient was discovered in 2006.

"These objects are very interesting, both by themselves and for what they tell us about neutron stars and supernovae," said McLaughlin. "We don't know what makes them different from pulsars -- why they turn on and off. If we answer that question, it's likely to tell us something new about the environments of pulsars and how their radio waves are generated."

The presence of rotating radio transients also "tell us there are more neutron stars than we knew about before," McLaughlin added, "and that means there are more supernovae explosions.  In fact, we now almost have more neutron stars than can be accounted for by the supernovae we can detect."

The Pulsar Search Collaboratory, led by NRAO education officer Sue Ann Heatherly and project director Rachel Rosen, includes training for teachers and student leaders. It also provides parcels of data from 300 hours of observations with the Green Bank Telescope for student teams to analyze. The project is a joint project of the NRAO and WVU, and is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Student teams use analysis software to reveal evidence of pulsars. In addition to learning how to use the software, participating students must also learn how to recognize man-made radio interference that can contaminate the data.

"The students get to actually look through data that has never been looked through before," said Rosen. From their training, she said, "the students get a wonderful grasp of what they're looking at, and they understand the science behind the plots that they're looking at."

"Science is a lot more exciting for me now that I've made this discovery," Bolyard said. Scientific research, he said, "is a lot of hard work, but it's worth it."

Bolyard said that while he would consider the possibility of eventually becoming an astronomer, "I'm still hoping to become a doctor."

Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelham...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-5169.