Senior Talks at the Observatory

Hello everyone,

We are excited to announce an upcoming Senior Talks event, our last event of the semester at the Strawbridge Observatory!

This Friday (04/24), from 8:30 to 10:30 PM*, in addition to our usual fare, we will be hosting talks from four senior undergraduate students from Haverford Astrophysics. You’ll get to learn about “Radio Emissions in the Center of the Milky Way” at 8:30, “Expanding Supernovae Superbubbles” at 8:45, “Formations of Spirals in Galaxies” at 9, and “Ultra-luminous X-ray Pulsar” at 9:15.

Together with our student talks, we will have crafts, a museum of demos and science exhibits, dome tours, and (weather permitting) stargazing and telescope viewings!

*These hours are drop-in! You won't miss anything if you come later.

For those interested, here are the full abstracts of the talks!

[8:30] At the center of our Milky Way lies an energetic region populated with unique and perplexing strands of radio emission. High resolution images of the Galactic Center taken with powerful radio telescopes continue to reveal new information that may improve our understanding of the Milky Way's evolution.

[8:45] Superbubbles are giant bubbles of ionized gas that expand through the powering of supernovae, the death of stars. My thesis studies the speed of their expansion and the energy supplied by the supernovae to push them forward.

[9:00] Even after decades of study, the nature of spirals in galaxies remains a mystery. This talk will focus on current spiral formation theories, as well as ways to test them observationally using different methods.

[9:15] The talk will focus on an ultraluminous X-ray pulsar, a dead neutron star which is consuming the atmosphere of its living companion star. This process is so bright that we can see it happening in another galaxy, and is brighter than what our current models say should be physically possible.