Monday, February 13, 2017

Astronomy on Tap: Galaxies and Pulsars Explained


Astronomy on Tap this evening was blessed with two very effective speakers: Dr. Louis Abramson, a postdoc at UCLA, and Anna Ho, a graduate student at Caltech.  Louis used a particularly novel means of describing how galaxies form, evolve, and die by comparing them to how humans are born, live our lives, and die.  This analogy held particularly well in talking about how the environment in which one lives affects one's overall life, whether it's in a big city (galaxy cluster) or in a rural area (void).  




Anna talked about pulsars, the end point of massive stars, and how we detect them with a variety of instruments.  She discussed the history of these exotic objects, and how they were initially thought to be alien signals!  Overall it was a great talk followed with lots of questions!




We had our usual quiz afterwards, and I guess I made the quiz too easy, since we had 6 people get 10/10!  I had to use a tie-breaker question to narrow down the winners to give adequate prizes.  Thanks, everyone for coming!






--Cameron

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