Monthly Meeting

 

 

SLAS Regular Meeting

McDonnell Hall, Washington University - St. Louis

7:30pm Friday, May 17, 2024

 

 “Understanding the Dark Universe with the Vera Rubin Observatory”

by

Gautham Narayan, PhD  ;  Univ of Illinois

 

Atop Cerro Pachon, at the southern reach of the Atacama Desert, scientists and engineers are building the largest machine ever conceived for astrophysics – the Vera Rubin Observatory. Next year, it will begin taking measurements as part of the “Legacy Survey of Space and Time,” surveying the entire available southern sky every four nights. With its 3.2 Gigapixel camera, Rubin Observatory will take 20 TB of data every night, and at the end of its 10-year survey, will have resolved 17 billion stars in our Milky Way, and discovered 20 billion galaxies outside of ours, and found 10 million sources that change every night – supernovae, quasars, asteroids, variable stars and things we haven’t even seen before. One of Rubin’s key missions is to understand the nature of matter and energy in our Universe in the “dark sector.” What is the nature of the dark matter, that astronomer Vera C. Rubin discovered in her examination of how galaxies rotate? What is this mysterious dark energy that is ~70% of the energy density of our Universe and seems to be pushing galaxies apart from each other at ever accelerating rate? I’ll tell you about the status of Rubin Observatory, and how the Dark Energy Science Collaboration will use Rubin data to try and answer these fundamental questions.

Gautham Narayan has been a professor in the department of Astronomy at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign since 2019. He was previously a postdoc at the National Optical and Infrared Laboratory in Tucson (which runs Rubin Observatory) and the Barry M. Lasker Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore (which runs Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope). He works on melding AI and Astrophysics, to analyze massive quantities of data from wide-field surveys, particularly to study sources in the time-domain, such as supernovae and kilonovae. He is a Simonyi-NSF CAREER Fellow, and the Analysis Coordinator for the Dark Energy Science Collaboration.

 


 

The meeting will begin at 7:30 PM Friday, May 17 in McDonnell Hall, Room 162, on the Danforth campus of Washington University, Saint Louis, MO 63105. McDonnell Hall is accessible from Forsyth Boulevard via Tolman Way. Free yellow zone and garage parking spaces are available. The event will also be available via Zoom online conference.

 

To request Zoom link, please click here

The event, cosponsored by NASA's Missouri Space Grant Consortium, is open to the public free of charge.

 

Meeting Agenda

Main Speaker

May elections for SLAS Board Members

Announcement Special Recognition Award Nominations are due by Sep 1st. 

Register now: MSRAL 2024 June 7-9, Hosted by Omaha Astronomical Society

 

Please renew your Expiring Memberships. LINK

SLAS has 2024 group permits for Whiteside and Danville.

 

 

Upcoming Meetings:

 

June 2024: Steven R Gullberg, PhD.   “Archeoastronomy”;  University of Oklahoma

 July 2024: Ashley Davies, PhD. “Juno Close Flybys of Io"; JPL

August 2024: Bradley Tsalyuk, Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, California Science Center

September 2024: Joseph Marcus, MD, "“Who Discovered the Expanding Universe?  Spoiler: Not Hubble!”

October 2024: Pamela Gay, PhD., "Secret Squirrel Stuff", Planetary Science Institute

November 2024: Robert Zubrin, PhD. “The Case for Mars”; The Mars Society

January 2025:  Bhupal Dev, PhD.  “Finding New Physics in Debris from Colliding Neutron “Stars; Washington University.

March 2025: Tom Rathjen  "What’s Happening in Human Space Flight”; The Aerospace Corporation

 

SLAS in the News

HECMedia: Dark Sky Missouri - Stacy Park Olivette, MO

Ladue News:  Seeing stars: Upcoming events and opportunities for St. Louis stargazing, By Ashley Klein,

Jefferson County Leader: Aim for the Stars, By Kevin Carbery, July 27, 2023

KMOV Channel 4 did a morning story on June 20, 2023 about the Library Telescope Program and the upcoming solar eclipses

https://www.kmov.com/video/2023/06/20/great-day-4-kids/

 

Our new SLAS coffee mugs have arrived. They will be available to purchase at
our regular meetings at Washington U. Price: $10 each, 2 for $15 

 

 

2024 Astronomy Events by Mark Jones



Social Hour - 30 min after meeting conclusion or 10:30 Which ever is earlier.

Randy Harrison's Lookin' Up Optics page:  http://lookinup.info/

Here are the websites that Dr. Gokhale mentioned in his talk in June
Dark Sky Missouri
www.darkskymissouri.org
Video: 'Saving the Dark' A film on Light Pollution by  Sriram Murali
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fHxNn-FEnc

Globe at Night program for light pollution

https://www.globeatnight.org/

 

 

Telescopes for Sale! 

 4.25-inch f/10, Reflecting Telescope, Wooden Tripod, 6x30mm finder, 1 ¼ focuser, $10
 
Majestic Tripod Head-only, Heavy Duty head, w/1/4x20 screw mount, Mounts to 1.5” post, crank pivots head in altitude direction, $10
 
Small Equatorial Mount. Manual with slow motion knobs and counterweight. Similar to Sky-Watcher EQ-2 mount, $30
 
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  - Link for details and photos
 



 Shirts and Mugs for sale!

Shirts and Mugs for Sale

All shirts are $10!!!

Moon Shirt
Globular Cluster Shirt
Pleiades Shirt
 There is also a Dobsonian shirt

New Poster from Guy Ottwell you might be interested in
It's called the Zodiac Wavy Chart
 
https://www.universalworkshop.com/zodiac-wavy-charts/?mc_cid=cfa6f33be8&mc_eid=9d6fcdbdfa

 

 

 

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