15 December 2021, 7:00 PM, Wednesday, Live-streamed via Zoom, YouTube and Facebook

“Not so Fast Supernova: Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays Detected in Star Clusters”

by

Ke Fang, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison

It’s not just light we receive from the Universe. We receive cosmic particles on the Earth that have travelled enormous distances at incredibly high speeds. Some of these particles carry extreme energies, millions of times higher than we can achieve using man-made particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider, here on Earth. Half a century after their first discovery, these cosmic rays remain mysterious. Where do they come from? Is there a smoking gun signal from their origin? How does nature manage to accelerate them to such high energies? This talk will tell you about these energetic messengers and what they say about nature’s accelerators, including the star clusters.

Brief Bio

Dr. Ke Fang obtained her doctorate in Astrophysics at University of Chicago in 2015. She worked as a JSI postdoc fellow jointly at University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from 2015 to 2018. In 2018 she was awarded NASA’s Einstein Fellowship, which brought her to Stanford University in 2018 to pursue her own research program. Earlier this year she moved to University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant Professor in the Department of Physics. She pieces together the information we receive from the Universe from a multitude of messengers, including high energy gamma ray radiation, ultra-light particles known as neutrinos, and cosmic rays, to study the extreme activities of the Universe.