Description:

CIERA Astronomer Evenings are special programs that take place on the last Friday of every month at Northwestern's Dearborn Observatory. Look through the historic telescope and meet and talk with astronomers from CIERA, Northwestern's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics! The talks are free and open to all.

This month, hear about two space missions in recent news - TESS and Gaia. TESS is a recently launched mission that aims to identify thousands of new exoplanets, with the potential to find hundreds of exoplanets that are (somewhat) similar to Earth. Gaia is an ongoing mission that recently released its first set of results, consisting of accurate three-dimensional positions of over 1 billion(!) stars in our Galaxy, revolutionizing our ability to understand the shape, structure, and history of the Milky Way. We'll discuss why these missions are important, and what we hope to learn from them.