proudly bring to Kalamazoo and SW Michigan Professor Jim Kaler who will present two lectures on the state of the cosmos...
Caption: a cluster of galaxies at a distance of 2 billion light
years, each galaxy containing 10s or 100s of billions of stars. The
arclets
of light are still more distant galaxies whose images are distorted by
the gravitational field of the foreground cluster, as predicted by
Einstein.
Image courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Spectacular Astronomy: New Results for a New Millennium
James B. Kaler
Department of Astronomy
University of Illinois
The twentieth century brought amazing advances in
our
knowledge
of the cosmos. We seem to be at the edge of
understanding
the
nature of the Universe. Yet astronomers, from
Aristotle
to Hubble,
have always thought that necessary way. And
always
they have been
surprised. What have the past millennium,
century,
decade - the last
year - wrought? How close are we to a full
understanding
of our
celestial surroundings? Spectacular new
telescopes
and technologies
await, both to solve old problems and - if the past is
any predictor at
all - to find new mysteries we have yet to dream of.
The promotional poster is here.
(obsolete link)
Two Hundred and Sixteen Years of Planetary Nebula Research
James B. Kaler
Department of Astronomy
University of Illinois
Planetary nebulae, bright expanding shells of dusty
gas
that
surround hot blue stars, are the ejected envelopes of
giant stars
whose hydrogen fusion chain has shut down, the central
stars the
giants' old nuclear-burning cores. Illuminated
by photoionization
by ultraviolet radiation from the hot core, the nebulae
tell us a
great deal about the processes that take place in dying
stars and
are an important interface in the recycling process
that
mixes
enriched stellar matter back into the interstellar
medium.
The
colloquium will give an overview of the subject from
discovery
through modern advances, focusing on the chemical
compositions,
structures, and evolution of the nebulae, and on the
conditions in
the central stars, which are in the process of becoming
white
dwarfs.
The colloquium announcement flier is here.
Caption: The "death shroud" of a low mass star like our Sun,
otherwise
known as a planetary nebula. Dubbed the "Ring Nebula," it lies 2300
light
years away in the constellation Lyra. This shell of glowing gas is the
former envelope of the star at center, thrown out into space at the end
of its life. The central stellar remnant has contracted to become what
is known as a ``white dwarf,'' just a bit larger in size than our
Earth.
The energetic light from its hot surface excites the atoms in the
surrounding
shell of gas to glow at different wavelengths of light. Image courtesy
of the Hubble Space Telescope.
James B. (Jim) Kaler,
Professor of Astronomy, earned his A.B. at the University of Michigan,
his Ph.D. at UCLA, and has been at the University of Illinois since
1964.
His research area, in which he has published over 100 papers, involves
dying stars. Prof. Kaler has held Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowships,
has been awarded medals for his work from the University of
Liège
in Belgium and the University of Mexico, and most recently was selected
to give the Armand Spitz lecture by the Great Lakes Planetarium
Association.
He has written for a variety of popular and semi-popular magazines
(including
Astronomy, Sky and Telescope, and Scientific American),
was
a consultant for Time-Life Books on their Voyage Through
the
Universe series, appears frequently on Illinois television and
radio,
and has produced several books, including Stars and their Spectra
(Cambridge), Stars and Cosmic Clouds (Scientific American
Library),
The
Ever-Changing Sky (Cambridge), Astronomy! A Brief Edition,
(Addison-Wesley),
and the recently published The Little Book of Stars
(Copernicus)
and Stars at the Edge (Cambridge). He is a current member of
the
Board of Directors of the Astronomical
Society of the Pacific, and is a past president of the Board of the
Champaign-Urbana Symphony.
Kirk T. Korista
(then) Assistant Professor of Astronomy
Department of Physics
Western Michigan University
last modified: 29 March 2007
