GUEST SPEAKER: Will Grundy, Astronomer, Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona ASTRONOMY TALK | NASA’s New Horizons mission broke records on New Year’s Day 2019 after encountering the most distant object in our solar system ever explored by a spacecraft – a small Kuiper Belt object named 486958 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule. The peanut-shaped […]
GUEST SPEAKER: Courtney Dressing, UC Berkeley Assistant Professor of Astronomy ASTRONOMY TALK | The NASA Kepler mission revealed that our Galaxy is teeming with planetary systems and that Earth-sized planets are common, but most of the planets Kepler detected orbit stars that are too faint to permit detailed study. Excitingly, the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey […]
GUEST SPEAKER: Marusa Bradac, UC Davis Associate Physics Professor ASTRONOMY TALK | One of the greatest accomplishments in recent astrophysics is the creation of a model for the history of the universe. The newborn universe was a dark place until the very first galaxies lit it up. Travel at the speed of light to journey back in […]
GUEST SPEAKER: Matt Malkan, UCLA Professor of Astronomy ASTRONOMY TALK | What’s new in the young universe? Shortly after the Big Bang, our universe has been measured to have been almost amazingly uniform. Fortunately for our existence, it didn’t stay that way long. The excess gravity of slightly over-dense regions slowed their expansion and eventually caused […]
GUEST SPEAKER: Alex Filippenko, Professor of Astronomy at University of California, Berkeley; Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences; Miller Senior Fellow in the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science ASTRONOMY TALK | We expected the attractive force of gravity to slow down the rate at which the universe is expanding. However, […]
