March 11, 2011: IceCube Astronomy

On March 11, one of our senior undergraduates majoring in astrophysics, David Fierroz, gave a talk about a neutrino telescope that he worked on last summer, IceCube. David talked about how IceCube was built at the South Pole and he described the long trip to get there. About 150 visitors came by to hear how the telescope is opening up a new branch of astronomy, discovering objects in a completely new way. As arguably the largest telescope in the world, IceCube will be able to observe some of the most extreme phenomena in the universe including supernova, and supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.


Afterwards, one of our incoming graduate students, Jia Liu, gave a talk about a standard day and night at Kitt Peak National Observatory. Also, one of our graduating students explained how Stellarium works and showed the conjunction of planets over the year. While the weather was not great enough to look at stars through the telescope, we were able to give tours of the telescope roof and dome, and even look at the moon.