Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Feb 9th - The Zoomable Universe

Our speaker this week was Caleb Sharf, a research scientist at Columbia University and Director of its Astrobiology Center. Caleb is a prolific writer with contributions in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, and Scientific American in addition to highly regarded scientific journals. He has also written a textbook on exoplanets and three popular science books on various astronomical topics.

In his talk Caleb gave an overview of his latest book, The Zoomable Universe. In it, he explores phenomena that cross the vast range of physical scales, from the very largest we can observe (the entire diameter of the observable Universe, about 10^27 meters) to the smallest (the Planck scale, 10^-35 meters, where the fabric of spacetime stops obeying known laws of physics).

Caleb uses this vast range - a factor of one hundred trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion, of which the human scale is conveniently close to the middle - to illustrate the incredible diversity of phenomenon in the Universe. Starting with the mysterious dark energy and the large scale structure of dark matter that makes up the skeleton of galaxy formation, we zoomed in repeatedly to examine the Local Group of galaxies, the birth of a solar system, the surface of a planet, and continued down to our own DNA and eventually the structure of spacetime. An illustrated version of this journey can be found here.

After his talk, Caleb fielded questions in the lecture hall while Columbia undergraduate Richard showed presentations on the 3D Wall while graduate students Steven and Aaron gave tours of the observatory. 

- David Hendel (graduate student)

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