Spring 2024
Saturdays March 23 - May 11, 2024 at 11am
Location: Kersten Physics Teaching Center, 5720 South Ellis Avenue, room 106
Christoph Welling, UChicago
KICP Fellow
How Astrophysicists See the Universe
Astrophysics is a tricky business. Even the closest stars are trillions of miles away, too far to explore them up close any time soon. So astronomers and physicists have to rely on observations they can make from earth. To do this, every night, and day, a wide array of observatories all over the world are catching the light from distant galaxies, radio waves from the early universe and even ripples in space-time itself.
This is a lecture series about these telescopes and how they are used to learn about the universe. We will talk about how modern observatories work, and what the light they detect can tell us about the objects it came from. We will also discuss new types of observatories, that do not detect light, but other messengers, like cosmic rays, neutrinos or gravitational waves.
This event is free and open to the public.
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