RFO Speaker Series: The Renaissance of Astrophysics with Dr. Raffaella Margutti

  • September 15, 2022 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

  • Pacific Standard Time

Ticket Price Free This event is now over
Description

Join RFO and Dr. Raffaella Margutti for an informative presentation about "The Renaissance of Astrophysics: A landscape of opportunities in the era of new observations."

Marguitti will share how new capabilities to study the night sky have led to recent discoveries and new ways to think about the universe around us. Astronomical transients are events that appear and disappear in the sky and are signs of catastrophic events in space, including the most extreme stellar (star) deaths and interactions between stars and supermassive black holes. Thanks to new and improved observational facilities, which use measurements of gravitational waves and light, we can now sample the night sky for astronomical transients with unprecedented resolution across the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond. This effort has led to the discovery of new types of stellar explosions, revolutionized our understanding of phenomena that we thought we already knew, and enabled the first insights into the physics of how black holes and stars interact.

Raffaella Margutti received her undergraduate degree in Astrophysics in 2006 (magna cum laude), and her PhD in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Milano Bicocca in 2010. Margutti is a Sloan Fellow in Physics (2019), a CIFAR global scholar in Gravity and the Extreme Universe (2019), and received the 2022 New Horizons in Physics Prize for leadership in laying foundations for electromagnetic observations of sources of gravitational waves, and leadership in extracting rich information from the first observed collision of two neutron stars. She is currently an Associate Professor of Astronomy and Physics at UC Berkeley, and her research is positioned in the new field of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics with Gravitational Waves. Margutti and her research team utilize observations of the most violent Transient Astrophysical Phenomena in the Universe, including stellar eruptions, stellar explosions, mergers of neutron stars and black holes, as well as stellar tidal disruptions by supermassive black holes.  

Date & Time

Thu, Sep 15, 2022 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Robert Ferguson Observatory

The Valley of the Moon Observatory Association (VMOA) is volunteer amateur and professional astronomers plus a small supporting staff organized as a nonprofit association to provide educational programs about science and astronomy for students, the public, and in support of educators.

The VMOA is responsible for the construction, maintenance and utilization of the Robert Ferguson Observatory and functions as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization under the auspices of the California State Parks System, and in cooperation with our local state parks.