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!

Each month, different experts will be available to answer your astronomy and astrophysics questions. These evenings begin with a 10-minute introduction to a topic in astronomy, followed by an open Q&A session and fun, interactive demonstrations.

The talks are free and open to all! No reservation needed.

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CIERA postdocs Deanne Coppejans and Rocco Coppejans will host this month’s event. They will present their research on building a dark matter detector and talk about how the birth of a neutron star in a supernova was captured for the first time. Guests are also invited to ask them any and all of their pressing astronomy questions!

Rocco will briefly discuss dark matter (what it is and why we believe it exists) before talking about his work to design and construct a scintillating liquid argon bubble chamber, which will be used to search WIMP dark matter.

On 17 June 2018 astronomers detected a bright and extremely fast supernova (explosion of a star) that immediately captured world-wide attention. Deanne will talk about why astronomers were so excited about this particular supernova (AT2018cow - aka "The Cow"), and how observations across the electromagnetic spectrum by astronomers at Northwestern captured the birth of a neutron star in a stellar explosion in real-time for the first time.

CIERA Astronomer Evenings are special programs that take place on the last Friday of every month at Northwestern's Dearborn Observatory.

http://www.physics.northwestern.edu/about/dearborn-observatory/