The passion for the sky, the difficulty in reconciling school commitments with nights at the astronomical observatory and the decision to explore the cosmos with the computer from home, analyzing the public data collected by telescopes and satellites: this is how the young amateur astronomer from Vicenza When he was only 16, Lorenzo Sassaro discovered a
variable star
in the southern constellation of
Carina
, called
MarSEC2_V2
and certified by the international organization for variable stars (American Association Variable Stars Observers,
Aavso
).
To tell the story of him is the Union of Italian Astronomers (Uai).
The young amateur astronomer Lorenzo Sassaro (source: UAI)
Lorenzo is enrolled in the 'Gian Giorgio Trissino' high school in Valdagno (VI) and has been attending the Marana di Crespadoro astronomical observatory for some years, the Marana Space Explorer Center (MarSEC), a territorial delegation of the Uai.
"Despite my great passion - says the young man - my school commitments at the moment do not allow me to go as high as I would like to the observatory for astronomical research nights. So I asked the Director of Research, Ivo Peretto, if it was also possible to contribute from It was thanks to my request that the director informed me of the possibility of doing data-mining (survey data analysis) and thanks to Stefano Lora I started a tutoring to learn how to look for variable stars and analyze their data .
The study activity gave its first fruits in an exceptionally short time.
As Stefano Lora explains, the variable star identified by Lorenzo “is located
1,480 light years from the Earth
, has a
temperature of 10,800 degrees
and
varies
its
luminosity
over a period of
one and a half days
.
These data suggest that it is actually a
pair of
interacting stars."