Plainville teen’s idea to make snowflakes in space picked for YouTube Space Lab contest; experiment could land on International Space Station

By Alli Knothe, Globe Correspondent

Emerald Bresnahan is 17 years old, lives in Plainville and thinks she may help find the answer to how the galaxy began -- by making a snowflake in outer space.

“I learned galaxy formation is similar to how snowflakes grow: The inside forms before the rest,” Bresnahan said yesterday.

So she designed an experiment designed to tackle that complex scientific question, an experiment that may be conducted later this year by an astronaut on the International Space Station, which is orbiting 250 miles above the Earth.

Emerald Bresnahan (Family photo)

Bresnahan is one of 60 students between the ages of 14 and 18 whose ideas were chosen yesterday to be finalists in the YouTube Space Lab competition. Bresnahan’s proposal was selected by a panel of scientific experts, including cosmologist Stephen Hawking, from more than 2,000 submitted to the international competition.

Jason Crusan, chief technologist for human exploration and operation at NASA, said that though NASA has a lot of programs geared toward getting students interested in science, this program became extremely successful because it was partnered with two major media powerhouses: YouTube and Google.

Next month, the experts will winnow the list further to six students -- two from the Americas, two from Europe, and Two from Pacific Asia -- whose ideas will be the semi-finalists. People can vote for their choice on YouTube, but the views of the experts will have greater weight in the final decision, organizers said.

In March, around the time Bresnahan turns 18 years old, two winners will be announced in Washington, DC.

The winners will have their experiments sent to the ISS on board a rocket launched from Japan. If she wins, Bresnahan will be able to watch her experiment on YouTube as it is conducted by an astronaut, officials said.

Until the results come in, though, it’s back to school for Bresnahan, who just completed her first semester as a freshman at Wheaton College in Norton. Last June, she graduated from New Testament Christian School in Norton, where she was named salutatorian.

Last semester, she received feedback on her experiment from Timothy Barker, a physics and astronomy professor at Wheaton who taught “The Universe,” an introductory astronomy class.

For her class, Bresnahan wrote a term paper that summarized her plans for the snowflake experiment.

“Hers was the most highly detailed scientific paper I’ve ever received in that course,” Barker said in an interview.

Though students at the college do not declare majors until their sophomore year, Bresnahan plans on getting a bachelor’s degree in physics with a minor in astronomy.

Bresnahan said she hopes to become a scientist some day.

“I love that kind of stuff, searching the unknown and trying to find answers,’’ she said. “It’s really fun.”