6:30–8:00 pm ERC 161
Seeing Southern Stars and Galaxies from the Windy City
Growing up in Chicago, it is hard to see anything in the night sky besides the moon and the brightest stars. However, opportunities to engage with astronomy and science abound in the windy city… and will shortly become even better! The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon come online to start its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and opportunities to interact with images from this survey will be available to citizen scientists. This survey of the southern and equatorial sky will collect 20 terabytes of imaging data every 24 hours… and will continue doing that over 10 years creating an unprecedented map of the sky covering a large area to great distances and across time.
In this talk, I will discuss why a survey like Rubin’s LSST will give insights into the role a galaxy’s environment may play in triggering its energetic center and how access to the LSST data will broaden the community of researchers able to work on these and other outstanding questions about our universe!
Short Biography
Dara Norman, Ph.D., who grew up in Chicago, is deputy director of the Community Science and Data Center at the NSF’s National Optical and Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab). She is the 50th president of the American Astronomical Society. Norman’s science focuses on the phenomena of active galactic nuclei, where a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy is emitting immense energy and how that impacts the galaxy’s evolution.
Dr. Norman has been active in efforts to improve science culture and grow the workforce of Astronomy and Astrophysics, and has co-authored numerous white papers, articles and a book on these topics. She has previously been an active member of the American Astronomical Society’s Committee on the Status of Minorities in Astronomy and chair of the ASTRO section of the National Society of Black Physicists.
Dr. Norman holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Astronomy from the University of Washington and a B.S. in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science from the Mass. Inst. of Technology.
Zoom: Link TBA
