This week's Astronomy public lecture was given by post-doc fellow, Nick Stone, from Columbia Astronomy. His talk "Stripping Stars: The Exciting Lives and Untimely Demise of Stars Near Supermassive Black Holes" led the audience to discover the dynamic processes associated with black holes. Starting with an introduction to basic dynamics predicted by Newton's laws of motion and then general relativity, Nick familiarized the audience with the concepts of four dimension time-space and interactions between objects via gravity. Then he explained in detail the physics of black hole accretion, and broadened the case to dual-black hole interactions with the help of simulations. Finally, Nick showed what phenomena when we can expect to see as observers on Earth and how we can observe these energetic events in the Universe.
About 150 people attended the lecture, after which they headed up to the Rutherfurd Observatory for to observe the Pleides open cluster and the spiral galaxy M31 (aka our nearest neighbor, Andromeda). Those who didn't go to the roof were treated to a slideshow on 'Gas Beyond the Milky Way Disk', by graduate student Yong Zheng, which introduced the very diffuse hot gas with more than 10 thousand degrees in the Milky Way potential well.
-- Yong Zheng (graduate student)
Cool. Its nice to see people gaining an interest in astronomy and in the logic of time-space and how the two interact. After studying string theory a little bit, I have to wonder how much of it is true. I know that many of those who support it are reputable, but many other theories are as well. Interesting fact: if you look sideways as you enter a black hole and wait long enough for the light to reach you, you can actually see the back of your own head.
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