Join Dr Filiminov for his lecture: Extreme Astronomy: Eyeing the Cosmos Through One Cubic Kilometer of Ice
Wednesday, April 18, 2012 – General Meeting
Randall Museum . 199 Museum Way . San Francisco
7:00 pm Doors Open . 7:30 pm Announcements . 8:00 pm Speaker
SFAA’s General Meetings occur on the 3rd Wednesday of each month (except January)
Kirill Filimonov, Ph.D.
Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California , Berkeley
EXTREME ASTRONOMY: EYEING THE COSMOS
THROUGH ONE CUBIC KILOMETER OF ICE
IceCube is the world’s largest particle detector buried a mile deep in the ice of Antarctica and searching for particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are expected to come from the most violent astrophysical sources—exploding stars, gamma ray bursts, and cataclysmic events happening in black holes and neutron stars. Unlike charged cosmic rays, neutrinos point back to their origin but are very difficult to detect. They travel at the speed of light through space, through the Earth, and all they encounter. Very rarely, one will crash into a single atom and create a cascade of other charged particles. This reaction will produce blue light that can be detected by optical sensors. To find these rare events, a neutrino telescope was built at the South Pole: a 1-cubic kilometer array of optical sensors buried a mile deep in the ultra-clear glacial ice. IceCube will attempt to elucidate the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays and probe the most extreme astrophysical accelerators.
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Dr. Kirill Filimonov earned his M.Sc. in nuclear physics at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, and his Ph.D. at McGill University in Canada. He worked at the particle accelerators at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and at the CERN laboratory in Europe. In 2005 he joined UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory to work on IceCube. He spent four field seasons working on the IceCube’s construction at the South Pole.
