Northside students claim SciFest award

TWO Northside students brought great pride to their school last week when they were crowned winners of SciFest@DIT 2014.

Of the over 90 projects exhibited at this year’s event, the top prize on the day went to fifth year students Kate Culligan and Clodagh Hunt-Sheridan from Dominican College, Drumcondra, for their project:

‘A research study of the X-ray properties of black hole binary stars’.

The first of the 15 regional science fairs of the 2014 SciFest@College programme saw over 200 students from schools all over the region exhibit more than 90 projects at DIT and put their knowledge of science to the test.

Katie and Clodagh said:

“The aim of our project was to examine the X-ray emissions of black holes in order to determine the existence of a three-state accretion disk model.

“We also looked at how the disk changes, and we confirmed our hypothesis of a hydrogen ionization limit cycle.

“We’re currently developing our project by looking at quasi-periodic oscillations, which can determine the mass of a black hole.

“We hope our research can be cross-topical in many areas, including general relativity and MRI scans.

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The Dominican College students also picked up the ESERO Ireland Discover Space Award and their teacher Michael Moriarty picked up the Discover Space Teacher Award.

They will go on to compete at the national final in November and the national final winner(s) of SciFest 2014 will be presented with a trophy and will represent Ireland at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) 2015 in Pittsburgh.

The SciFest 2013 national final winner was Paul Clarke from Raheny. Paul solved a mathematical problem that has been baffling mathematicians since the 1930s. His discovery has taken us a step closer to solving the Travelling Salesman Problem, which has applications in business models including computer routing and networking.

Paul also won the top award at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition 2014 in January.