The 16th annual Astronomy at the beach was hosted this past Saturday (9/22).  It was hosted by Kensington Metropark and the Great Lakes Association of Astronomy Clubs (GLAAC). It was fun and exciting. At Kensingston park hundreds of people gathered to come out and participate. There were telescopes lined up all around the lake, there were 3D presentations, and there was a keynote speaker. 

Let me start by saying that even though it was an extremely cold outside and that it is totally probably that I caught a cold during that night......It was all worth it.  The speaker was an astronaut. A real astronaut.  He came in wearing a blue NASA jump suit and I even got to shake his hand!!!!

The keynote speaker was Dr. Andrew J. Feustel.  He is a geophysicist from Lake Orion, Michigan.  He went to Oakland Community College and Purdue University. He participated in two NASA missions in 2006 and 2009. Both times his family could not see him land. The first time was because the weather conditions didn't permit it and the second was because it was night when the space shuttle landed.  Feutsel spoke about both his missions and he showed video of himself and the space ship crews in space. I have to say that the videos they made, made space travel look sooooo fun! I guess the fun of making the videos made up for the intense raining he had to do in order to get ready for the missions.  Also he told us that he and his crew members assembled the final parts of the international space station and all i could think of was wow I shook hands with someone that will go down in history!

Here is a picture of Dr. Andrew Feutsel, he was the perfect speaker for Astronomy at the beach and he made a cold night awesome. Google him for more information or use this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_J._Feustel. He seemed like a pretty awesome guy.

September 20, 2012 Colloquia

On Thursday September 20, 2012 the astronomy department had an exciting and engaging Colloquium. Wendy Freedman, presented data on two projects she participated in. The first was the CSP and the second the CHP. 

Wendy Freedman has been a frequent guest speaker at the University of Michigan she comes on average once every three years.  Freedman graduated from the University of Toronto in 1984 with her Ph.D. She now works at Carnegie and in 2009 she won the Gruber Cosmology Prize.

She spoke on her and her colleagues work on the Carnegie Supernova and Hubble Constant Project (hints the CSP and CHP). She focused mostly on the current cosmological model, dark energy, Hubble's Constant (Ho) and the Carnegie Supernova project.

She gave detailed information about the Friedman equation and the cosmological framework (Einstein's tension vs. energy momentum tension)

Freedman showed that the current concordance model states that Ho = 72 + or - 5 km/sec/Mpc, but according to her and her colleagues work at Carnegie the newly estimated value of Ho = 73.8 + or - 2.4 km/sec/Mpc. 

This is a huge break through and she is going to study further into it with the CSP-I which began in 2011 and will run for seven years in total according to her. So be on the look out for updated values of Ho and keep up to date on how the CSP project is progressing. 

On September 13, 2012 the Astronomy department had an interesting visitor Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz (pictured below).  Ramirez-Ruiz is a member of one of the best astronomy research schools in the United States, the University of California.

Ramirez-Ruiz gave a very interesting and exciting hour long lecture on the tidal disruption of stars by massive black holes.  He presented his data in a convincing matter which included; pictures, videos, equations, and graphs.

Ramirez-Ruiz said his motivation was that he wanted to unveil dead quasars.  To achieve his goal he said he had to first digest the matter surrounding black holes. This matter of course included stars.  He explained that the orbits of stars can be greatly impacted by massive black holes, he also stated that there were close and long distance encounters.  Ramirez-Ruiz said that stars that are tidally altered by massive black holes engage in a random walk and they have non linear angular momentum. One of the most interesting things he did was compare the equations of both the Schwarzchild radius and the Tidal radius.  He explained that Tidal radius gets weaker with mass gain and that the Schwarzchild radius was linear with mass gain.  The biggest topic he discussed that caught my attention was 'imposter' stars.  He explained how lower mass stars can appear to have greater masses, hints the title 'imposter' stars.

Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz presented an incredible lecture and I felt like it was a true pleasure to meet him and ask him questions about his research. He has an awesome personality and he is quite funny!