Observational Astronomy

Dr. Jon Jenkins, head of the Data Analysis team on the Kepler Mission, will discuss the current status of the Kepler mission and the ailing spacecraft, and will also discuss the recently selected TESS Mission, which will follow on from Kepler in detecting planets by observing the dimming of starlight as planets pass in front of the parent star. 

Surveys for radio pulsars serve as excellent historical records of the Galactic and extragalactic radio sky on sub-second time scales. Isolated radio impulses, such as those theorized to occur as signposts for evaporating black holes, coalescing neutron stars, and other violent phenomena, might be detectable in pulsar survey data. Lorimer et al.

No scientist is a Spock-like android; a scientist's work is as intuitive, and just as full of human foibles, as a painting, a symphony, or a prayer. But most of us don't have the opportunity (or training) to reflect on the human dimensions of our work. Br.

Directly imaging exoplanets is both scientifically exciting but notoriously challenging. Scientifically, obtaining images of rocky planets in the habitable zones of stars is key to finding if and how life developed outside the solar system.

How do stars form?  How can we use radio waves to probe the origins of stars within their cold, dusty natal clouds?  And how do magnetic fields affect the star-formation process?  Come and find out how I use CARMA, a millimeter-wave radio telescope in the Eastern Sierras, to find answers to these questions.  I will begin by discussing the basics of radio astronomy, radio telescopes, and star formation.

In this talk Dr. Fassnacht will show how the powerful combination of sensitive, high-resolution imaging with gravitational lensing can provide direct observational tests of galaxy formation scenarios under the cold dark matter paradigm as well as interesting constraints on cosmology. In particular, he will discuss the following two subjects. (1) Placing constraints on the Hubble Constant, curvature, and the dark energy equation of state parameter that are independent of and complementary to those obtained by other observational probes.

Dr. Bill Borucki is the principal investigator and head of the Kepler Mission to find 'exoplanets' around other stars.

The thermodynamic temperature of the Sun's atmosphere rises from ~6000K at the visible surface to millions of degrees in its outer atmosphere, the corona. This hot coronal plasma then expands supersonically to become the solar wind; this wind acceleration process is ongoing to very high altitudes (~10 solar radii) There is no sufficient thermal energy source for this heating and expansion, however remote sensing measurements of the coronal magnetic field suggest that the magnetic energy density is more than enough.

Fullerenes are a class of large and remarkably stable carbonaceous molecules in the shape of a hollow sphere or ellipsoid; the best known member of the class is the archetypical “buckminsterfullerene” C60 that resembles a soccer ball (and is therefore often called “buckyball”). Dr. Cami and colleagues have recently discovered the unmistakable spectral signatures of the fullerene species C60 and C70 in Spitzer observations of a young planetary nebula, and these are now the largest molecules known to exist in space.

The rich history of time-domain Jupiter data is of great value because it provides a whole new angle of attack, distinct from spatial-domain (imaging) data or from spectral-domain data. Time-domain Jupiter data provides a unique way to learn more about processes such as heat transport, atmospheric structure and evolution, composition, the formation of clouds and hazes, impact processes, and impactor populations. Dr.