Wednesday, June 20, 2012 – General Meeting
Randall Museum . 199 Museum Way . San Francisco
7:00 pm Doors Open . 7:30 pm Announcements . 8:00 pm Speaker
The Very Brightest Supernovae:
Nature’s New Mysterious Explosions Defy Conventional Explanation
presentation by
Adam Miller
UC Berkeley – Dept. of Astronomy
Join Adam Miller for a presentation on The Very Brightest Supernovae: Nature’s New Mysterious Explosions Defy Conventional Explanation. Massive stars punctuate the end of their luminous phase with brilliant explosions known as supernovae. These explosions have been observed for over 1000 years and they are responsible for the dispersal of heavy elements, such as iron and silicon, throughout the universe. In this talk Miller will review the various sub-types of supernovae and the methods used by astronomers to discover and better understand these mysterious explosions.
Adam Miller is a graduate student in the UC Berkeley Department of Astronomy and a member of the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). He received bachelors in physics and theater at MIT and a master’s in physics from theUniversity ofCambridge. He is currently working towards a doctorate at UC Berkeley. His research interests include anything that “goes bump in the night”: all astronomical objects that vary in brightness over long or short durations of time. As a member of the PTF he has contributed to their discovery of more than one thousand supernovae in the past three years, including the very bright supernova 2011fe in the spiral galaxy M101, which was featured on PBS NewsHour.
