6:00–7:00 pm Adler Planetarium
Title: The Extreme Universe
Abstract: The universe is full of black holes, from which light cannot escape and neutron stars, as heavy as the sun yet smaller than Chicago. Remarkable astronomical discoveries have revealed the varied ways in which they behave. They expand the physics of the laboratory and everyday life into new territory characterized by extremes of energy, density, temperature, magnetism and so on. In this lecture I will attempt to explain, in simple language, what we have learned from astronomical observations, and how the study of black holes and neutron stars expands our appreciation of physical science.
Bio: Roger Blandford took his BA, MA and PhD degrees at Cambridge University. Following postdoctoral research at Cambridge, Princeton and Berkeley he took up a faculty position at Caltech in 1976 becoming the Tolman Professor in 1989. In 2003, he become the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford and is currently the Director of the Simons Collaboration on Extreme Electrodynamics of Compact Sources. With Kip Thorne he co-authored Modern Classical Physics. His research interests include compact sources, cosmic rays, cosmology, and astrobiology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. He chaired the 2010 Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He was awarded the 1998 AAS Heineman Prize , the 2013 RAS Gold Medal, the 2016 Crafoord Prize for Astronomy and the 2020 Shaw Prize for Astronomy.
