17 November 2021, 7:00 PM, Wednesday, Live-streamed via Zoom, YouTube and Facebook

“A Star is Born, and Planets Too”

by

Gibor Basri, Emeritus Professor, UC Berkeley

We live in a privileged time, when at last humans have been able to directly see other stars and planets as they are being born. Needless to say, this has enabled us to answer age-old questions about how the Sun and Earth were made. It turns out the process is beautiful! We are now certain that planets are a natural outcome of star formation. I’ll explain in simple terms the universal star and planet formation mechanisms and events. These same processes are also at work in spiral galaxies and around black holes. The talk is richly illustrated with pictures from major observatories on Earth and in space that have enabled us (along with computer modeling) to learn how stars and planets are born and watch the whole process unfolding.

Brief Bio

Gibor Basri is Professor Emeritus in Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his BSc in Physics from Stanford University in 1973, and PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1979, and joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1982. At first his work concentrated on star formation as well as continuing studies of stellar magnetic activity. In the 1990s he was a discoverer and early pioneer in the study of brown dwarf stars, in addition to the rotation and activity on low mass stars.

In the 2000s he became a Co-Investigator on NASA’s Kepler mission, which revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets and took stellar science in new directions.

Professor Basri has written 200 technical publications along with many review articles, and served on committees helping to award major NASA and NSF grants and TAC’s awarding time at both the Lick and Keck Observatories.