A giant star cluster in the constellation Carina, about 20,000 light years from Earth, photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Someday soon college students at Winona State University could join researchers from around North America measuring light from stars and galaxies billions of miles away. Those students would work with small-scale, experimental instruments that could change how we observe the universe.

That’s what professor Adam Beardsley at Winona State hopes to accomplish. An astronomer, Beardsley is in the early stages of designing a radio-wave observatory to study space after recently receiving a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

“The main thing that I really want to do is kind of stand up a facility where you can come to test your ideas,” Beardsley said. “I have collaborators at other universities as well, where we have ideas for how you can develop the technology that you need to do very precise measurements, but we can test them out closer to home.”

At the same time, students would get experience working with equipment they normally wouldn’t touch until after they graduate, where they could work at larger observatories or research stations across the globe. That’s part of a larger goal at Winona State according to Nicole Williams, dean of the university’s College of Science and Engineering.

“They do everything they can so that undergraduate students can get that kind of graduate school research experience,” Williams said.

Most people associate radio wave frequencies with songs and other sounds we hear, but radio waves are a part of the light spectrum. Humans can only see certain colors, but there are all kinds of different ways to see light — think ultraviolet, x-ray or infrared, for example.

Radio waves can tell scientists when a star is formed. New stars and galaxies have hydrogen gas that emits radio waves at a very specific frequency, or color. At the Winona Radio Observatory, students and researchers could track those radio waves from natural phenomenon across the universe.

“It’s all about trying to get as much information as we can,” Beardsley said. “Different parts of the light spectrum can tell you different things.”

Winona’s a good spot for this kind of observatory, Beardsley says. Nestled in Mississippi River bluff country, Winona is urban enough to allow for utility connections and supplies but rural enough to be far away from big cities with lots of radio wave sources that could interfere with data and imaging.

It’s too early to say how much an observatory will cost. The observatory won’t be as large as some of the research centers Beardsley works with, including stations in South Africa and western Australia where he helps clean radio wave data to ensure it’s not tainted by manmade technology.

But Winona’s arguably better positioned to gather data than other observatories around the U.S. And if everything comes together, radio telescopes in Winona could join with observatories in New Mexico, Arizona, Mexico, Canada and other spots around North America to boost research.

“You can kind of get these telescopes all around the continent to communicate together,” Beardsley said. “It becomes a super powerful telescope, and so there’d be a station here that can contribute to that.”

That goal is years away, however. Beardsley’s grant over the next five years allows him to plan out where an observatory could be built as well as the initial experiments to be done there. He doesn’t have land picked out yet, but it could go anywhere in the Winona area.

His colleagues at Winona State support the project; university staff are already preparing to seek grants and other funding once the observatory is designed. This isn’t the first space-related grant to come to Winona — fellow professor and astronomer Carl Ferkinhoff received a National Science Foundation grant in 2019 to research gasses found in early stars and galaxies.

That work led to international trips, conferences and even science programming at Kids First, an afterschool program in Winona for K-12 students.

Beardsley plans to hire students as part of the design process, meaning undergraduates will be able to shape how the observatory functions before it’s even built.

“I’m hoping people find that exciting,” he said.