Astro Night – October 6

Fri, October 07, 2016

Imke_dailycal_09.06.goldwater

EVENT TIMES AND LOCATION INFORMATION

Doors: 7:00pm

Talk: 7:30pm – 8:30pm

*Stargazing: 8:30pm – 9:30pm 

Title: What Wonderful Worlds – Exploring our Solar System

Abstract: Our knowledge about our own Solar System has increased by leaps and bounds over the past few decades due to a combination of spacecraft missions and technical advancements on groundbased telescopes. We will start with a short overview of our Solar System, with the numerous bodies now known to orbit the Sun. Many of these have become familiar to us as individual worlds, including Pluto, several asteroids, and comets. During the second part of the talk we will focus on recent results our group obtained with regard to Io, one of Jupiter’s large moons, which is the most volcanically active body in our Solar System.

Bio: Imke de Pater is a Professor in the departments of Astronomy and of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California at Berkeley; she Chaired the Astronomy Department from 2010-2015. She started her career observing and modeling Jupiter's synchrotron radiation, followed by detailed investigations of the planet's thermal radio emission.  Over the past 1.5 decades, she has exploited adaptive optics techniques in the infrared range to obtain high angular resolution data of e.g. volcanic activity on Io, weather on Titan, planetary rings, and the giant planets; she flew on the Sofia airplane, and used the recently upgraded Very large Array to map the atmospheres of the giant planets.

Imke has written two books together with Jack Lissauer: "Planetary Sciences" (most recent edition: 2015) and "Fundamental Planetary Science: Physics, Chemistry and Habitability,” in 2013. Both books were/are published with Cambridge University Press. She has received a number of prestigious awards during her career, and is a member of several (inter)national committees.

 

*NOTE*: Stargazing is dependent on weather conditions; lectures will always occur as scheduled. For more information please visit the Astro Night event page.