Astro Night! April 7th
Fri, April 08, 2016
Astro Night is a free stargazing and lecture event open to the public. Held on the first Thursday of the month (during select months, as weather permits), members of the public are invited to take part in guided stargazings using our fleet of telescopes, including our 17-inch telescope located in our roof-top observatory, in addition to attending a lecture from one of our many researchers.
EVENT TIMES AND LECTURE INFORMATION
Doors: 7:00 pm
Talk: 7:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Stargazing*: 8:30 pm – 10:00 pm **CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER CONDITIONS**
Francois Foucart (UC Berkeley) – "Gravitational Waves: A New Window to Observe the Universe"
In February, the LIGO collaboration announced the first detection of grativational waves, ripples of spacetime predicted by Eintstein's theory of general relativity that scientists have been attempting to measure directly for decades. These waves were emitted by the merger of two black holes about a billion light-years away, an extreme event in which two objects about thirty times as massive as the sun collide and merge in a fraction of a second. Gravitational waves allo us to observe events otherwise entirely invisible to us, and to test or understanding of the laws of gravity in new, extreme regimes. I will discuss how grativational waves were detected, what we can learn from them, and how they will be used in the future to observe the Universe.
Francois Foucart is a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He received a PhD in Physics from Cornell University, after finishing engineering degrees at the Free University of Brussels and the Ecole Centrale Paris.
*NOTE*: Stargazing is dependent on weather conditions; lectures will always occur as scheduled. For more information please visit the Astro Night event page.