Corning Community College and the Elmira-Corning Astronomical Society are co-hosting, “Diamonds in the Sky: The Many Deaths of Stars,” on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 7 p.m. in the Triangle Lounge, Commons Building, Spencer Hill campus, Corning. This event is part of the Harlow Shapley Visiting Lecture program sponsored by the American Astronomical Society in recognition of the International Year of Astronomy. Dr. Steven Kawaler, professor and director of graduate education in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Iowa State University, will speak about the deaths of stars.
Stars, like people, do not live forever. As they run out of nuclear fuel, stars exhibit dramatic and relatively rapid changes. Their final states are extremely unusual by eventually becoming white dwarf stars with material so densely packed together that a teaspoon’s worth has the same mass as the left side of the New York Yankees’ infield. Other stars will produce cataclysmic explosions called supernovae, which leave behind neutron stars - even denser stars with the mass of our Sun but a size not much larger than Manhattan, spinning many times a second. Finally, some stars collapse completely to form black holes - regions of space from which, Einstein tells us, nothing, including light, can escape. In this lecture, Dr. Kawaler will discuss each of these possible end-states of stars, and describe some of the strange new physics learned from these stellar corpses.
Dr. Kawaler’s research probes the life and death of stars using seismological probes of their interiors. A past director of the Whole Earth Telescope network, he is currently a member of the team that will analyze data from the Kepler mission for asteroseismic signals. He received his undergraduate degree in physics from Cornell University, a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin, and joined the faculty at Iowa State following postdoctoral research at Yale. Dr. Kawaler, Carl J. Hansen, and Virginia Trimble coauthored, Stellar Interiors: Physical Principles, Structure, and Evolution. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of Division V (Variable Stars) of the International Astronomical Union.
This event is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Deborah Dann, associate professor of Astronomy and Geology, at (607) 962-9316.
