Welcome to the Westport Astronomical Society

Galactic Archaeology: Finding Fossils in the Sky – Dr. Keith Hawkins, Columbia

Almost every star you see in the night sky with your naked eye is apart of a vast system called the Milky Way. It is an average-sized barred spiral galaxy with upwards of 100 billion stars and its formation, assembly and evolution is still a mystery. In this talk, I will discuss how Galactic archaeology is being used today to understand how the Milky Way came to be.

Dr. Keith Hawkins is currently a Simons Junior Research Fellow at Columbia University in the city of New York primarily exploring the Milky Way Galaxy (its formation, evolution, and structure) using stellar spectroscopy as his tool. In the Fall of 2018, he will be moving to the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor of Astronomy. 

Hawkins main interest is in using multi-object spectroscopic surveys to better understand the chemo-dynamic properties of the Milky Way (Galactic Archaeology). His expertise is in high- to low-resolution spectroscopy and stellar chemical abundance patterns. 

He completed his Ph.D. in 2016 at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge UK, under a Marshall Scholarship, and King’s College Cambridge Studentship. Hawkins primarily worked with Prof. Gerry Gilmore and Prof. Paula Jofre (now at UDP, Chile).  Before his time at the University of Cambridge, he received a B.S. in Astrophysics (with minors in Mathematics and African Studies) from Ohio University in 2013.

Education 

Ph.D. Astronomy — University of Cambridge, August 2016
B.S. Astrophysics (summa cum laude), minor in Mathematics, certificate in African Studies, Ohio University, Honors Tutorial College, May 2013

The WAS Annual Summer Solstice Star-B-Q Picnic and Elections

We roll out the WAS Grill of Carbonation for another celebration of the many successful years of the Westport Astronomical Society! Members are invited to join us for a family fun picnic with deliciously grilled goodies ending with our annual WAS Board of Directors election.

ARRL Summer Field Day with WAS, GBARC, and HARC

2018 ARRL Field Day is June 23-24

Family Fun Day with WAS at Wakeman Town Farm

The WAS Away Team takes out the solar telescopes for more fun on the farm

Charles Liu, Associate Professor, College of Staten Island and The City University of New York

Charles Liu, Associate Professor, College of Staten Island and The City University of New York

Charles Liu is an extragalactic observational astronomer.  His research focuses on colliding galaxies, starburst galaxies, and the star formation history of the universe; and it also wanders into the realm of quasars and active galactic nuclei.  He also has a great love of teaching – informal as well as formal – and he feels a great need to help make the scientific community a better place for all people who wish to be a part of it.  He currently serves as faculty director of the Macaulay Honors College and The Verrazano School at CSI, and as Education Officer and Councilor of the American Astronomical Society.

Bob Meadows at Stellafane posing with the Lego Telescope before the… Incident.

The Annual Bob Meadows Stellafane Report

Professor Priyamvada Natarajan, Yale

Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos | Professor Priyamvada Natarajan, Yale

Priyamvada (Priya) Natarajan is a professor in the departments of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University. She is noted for her work in mapping dark matter and dark energy, particularly with her work in gravitational lensing, and in models describing the assembly and accretion histories of supermassive black holes. Recipient of many honors and awards for her research, she is also deeply invested in the public dissemination of science and de-mystifying the scientific process. She authored the award-winning, book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos published in 2016.

Dr. Natarajan was recently featured in Janna Levin’s PBS special NOVA: Black Hole Apocalypse

Dr. Rachel Rosen

Gravity: A Status Report | Dr. Rachel Rosen, Columbia

Rachel Rosen is a physicist and Assistant Professor of Theoretical Physics at Columbia University. Her research involves quantum field theory, cosmology, astrophysics and massive gravity. In particular, she has investigated the problem of the inconsistencies known as “ghosts,” and how to formulate models of massive gravity that avoid them.

Rosen received her undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Physics from Brown University. At New York University, she studied the Bullet Cluster with Glennys Farrar and helium-core white dwarfs with Gregory Gabadadze. She received her Ph.D. from that institution in 2009. In 2013, she received a Blavatnik Award for a Young Scientist for work on massive gravity. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

In July 2017, the Simons Foundation announced that Gabadadze, Rosen and Claudia de Rham would lead a “Cosmology Beyond Einstein’s Gravity” research effort as part of the Foundation’s new cosmology initiative.

Caleb Scharf is the director of the Astrobiology Center at Columbia University in New York.

 

The Zoomable Universe | Caleb Scharf, Columbia

The answer to life, the universe, and everything may actually be 63 – the number of orders of magnitude of physical scale that
we can access. The journey from the cosmic horizon to the subatomic is full of fascinating waypoints, but what do we really
know about the nature of reality and what are the biggest mysteries still waiting to be solved.

Dr. Caleb A. Scharf is Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University and has an international reputation as a research astrophysicist and as a lecturer to college and public audiences. The UK’s Guardian newspaper has listed his blog Life, Unbounded, as one of their “hottest science blogs,” while an editor at Seed Magazine called it “phenomenal.Informed, fresh, and thoughtful.” Scharf is author and co-author of more than 100 scientific research articles in astronomy and astrophysics. His work has been featured in publications such as New Scientist, Scientific American, Science News, Cosmos Magazine, Physics Today, and National Geographic, as well as online at sites like Space.com and Physorg.com.

His textbook for undergraduate and graduate students, Extrasolar Planets and Astrobiology, won the 2012 Chambliss Prize of the AAS. His articles and reviews have appeared in such prestigious publications as Science, Nature, The Astrophysical Journal, and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Dr. Scharf is a regular keynote speaker at academic meetings, such as for the American Physical Society, museums, and both public and private venues, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York. He has been a guest on Krulwich on Science at NPR, William Shatner’s “Weird or What?” and has served as a consultant to editors and producers at National Geographic Magazine, The Science Channel, The Discovery Channel, and The New York Times.

Mark Richardson Postdoctoral Fellow American Museum of Natural History

Mark Richardson, American Museum of Natural History

TBA

Dr. Sarbani Basu

 

Dr. Sarbani Basu – Chair of the Department of Astronomy, Yale University

Sarbani Basu is a Professor in the Department of Astronomy at Yale University. She is also the current Chair of the Department. Dr. Basu received her training in India, and subsequently worked in the U.K. and Denmark before moving to the US to join the Institute for Advance Study, Princeton, NJ. She has been on the faculty of Yale since 2000.

Dr. Basu specializes in the study of the Sun and other stars using data on stellar oscillations (star quakes). Her past research was devoted to studying the details of the structure and dynamics of the Sun, which allowed her claim, long before the particle physics community, that the solar neutrino problem was a problem with the standard model of particle physics, not that of astrophysics. Her current research focuses on two separate topics: The first is the study of variations in the Sun over time-scales that are of societal relevance. To this end she uses solar oscillation data to examine changes that take place inside the Sun over periods of years and decades. Her second focus is to study stars, in particular exo-planet hosts, to determine their structure, age and formation histories in order to understand those systems as well as to shed light on the past and future of the Sun and the solar system. She has more than 200 peer-reviewed publications.

Dr. Basu was awarded the Vainu Bappu Gold Medal of the Astronomical Society of India in 1996 for her contribution to the study of the structure and dynamics of the Sun. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), a Consortium of educational and other non-profit institutions that operates major publicly funded astronomical observatories in the US. Basu was awarded the 2018 George Ellery Hale prize by the American Astronomical Society for her work studying solar oscillations.