This is a free and open to the public hybrid event, held both inperson and online. Due to the newly effective insurance requirements, we regret that we can not allow people under 18 on the Chapman Campus, they are welcome to attend online.

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This meeting’s speaker will present inperson on the campus of Chapman University.

THE SHAKING COSMOS:

Observing the Universe in

Gravitational Waves with LISA

Virtually everything we know about the Universe has been discovered from the study of photons — light in all its myriad forms from radio waves, to visible light, to x-rays and beyond.  At the dawn of the 21st century, advanced technology is providing access to the Cosmos through detection of sub-atomic particles like cosmic rays and neutrinos, and through detection of ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself.

These ripples in spacetime, called gravitational waves, carry information not in the form of light or particles, but in the form of gravity itself.  Gravitational waves are messengers which carry the stories of what happens when two black holes collide at the centers of galaxies, of how the compact stars fall into monstrous black holes, and of how the graveyard of the galaxy is filled with the quiet whisper of binary white dwarf stars that spiral together ever so slowly as they fade into oblivion.

This talk will explore the modern description of gravity, what gravitational waves are and how we hope to measure them, and what we hope to learn from their detection. We’ll focus on the forthcoming space gravitational wave observatory, LISA, being launched in the early 2030s by ESA and NASA. Gravity has a story to tell, and in this talk, we’ll explore some of discoveries we hope to make by listening.

Shane Larson is a research professor of physics at Northwestern University, where he is the Associate Director of CIERA (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics). He works in the field of gravitational wave astrophysics, specializing in studies of compact stars, binaries, and the galaxy.  He works in gravitational wave astronomy with both the ground-based LIGO project, and future space-based observatory LISA. He was formerly a tenured associate professor of physics at Utah State University. He is an award winning teacher, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He contributes regularly to a public science blog at writescience.wordpress.com, and tweets with the handle @sciencejedi

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This is a free and open to the public hybrid event, held both inperson and online. Due to the newly effective insurance requirements, we regret that we can not allow people under 18 on the Chapman Campus, they are welcome to attend online.

 Join Zoom

This meeting’s speaker will present online from Heidelberg, Germany.

A Journey Through Binary Black Holes

The zoo of binary black holes has never been so rich. Before the first LIGO-Virgo detection of gravitational waves in 2015, we could only speculate about the existence of binary black holes, i.e. systems composed of two black holes orbiting about each other. Now, the number of detected binary black holes approaches the 100 mark, and we expect many new discoveries in the next few months. The mass of the black holes observed by LIGO and Virgo ranges from a few up to a few hundred times the mass of our Sun. Some of them are relatively nearby, others merged several Billion years ago and their gravitational wave signal reached us from far away. In this talk, we will explore the main properties of binary black holes and discuss their main formation channels and open questions.

Michela Mapelli obtained her PhD in Astrophysics from the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS, Trieste, Italy) in 2006. She then moved to Zurich (Switzerland) for a postdoctoral fellowship. In 2010, she got a permanent research position at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), where she built her first research group focused on the study of black holes of different sizes. After holding a professorship at the University of Innsbruck (Austria, 2017-2018) and Padova (Italy, 2018-2023), she recently became Full Professor of Computational Physics at the University of Heidelberg (Germany). During her career, she obtained several prizes for her research on black holes, including the MERAC Prize 2015 for the Best Early Career Researcher in Theoretical Astrophysics and a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council. In 2009, several years before the first gravitational-wave detection, she proposed the formation of black holes with mass about 30-50 times the mass of our Sun. She is now an enthusiastic member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration and is planning for the next-generation gravitational-wave detectors.

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This is a free and open to the public hybrid event, held both inperson and online. Due to the newly effective insurance requirements, we regret that we can not allow people under 18 on the Chapman Campus, they are welcome to attend online.

 Join Zoom

This meeting’s speaker will present inperson on the campus of Chapman University.

Tips and Secrets on Planetary Imaging

This talk will discuss the preparation, imaging capture and processing for Planetary Imaging.

Christopher Go lives on the island of Cebu in the Philippines. He has been an amateur astronomer since 1986, the year of the return of Halley’s Comet. He studied at the University of San Carlos where he received a BS in physics.

Starting as an amateur astronomer with a pair of 10×40 binoculars, Chritopher Go would later own several different telescopes. He currently uses a Celestron C14 for planetary imaging.

Chris’s main astronomical interests are planetary imaging, particularly of Jupiter and Saturn.

In February 2006, Christopher Go discovered that the white spot Oval BA of Jupiter (later called Red Spot Jr.) had turned red. He joined planetary scientists Imke de Pater and Phil Marcus to observe Jupiter in the spring of 2006 with the Hubble Space Telescope. He was also involved with follow-up Hubble and Keck telescope observations of Jupiter.

In 2008, he received the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers’ prestigious Walter Haas Award. In June 3, 2010, he confirmed the Jupiter Impact that was observed by Anthony Wesley. Asteroid 2000 EL157 has been named 30100Christophergo, in his honour.

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