A Summer of Astounding Astrophysics
James Kakalios is a Taylor Distinguished Professor and Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy. His experimental research ranges from the nano to the neuro, and he is active program in outreach and public engagement. In this talk he will discuss the principle of gravity as it relates to Superman. Isaac Newton's Law of Gravitational Attraction will be used to explain why Superman's home planet Krypton exploded. He will then turn to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in order to account for how Superman was able to reverse time by rapidly orbiting Earth in the 1978 Warner Bros' film Superman: The Movie. Prepare to be educated in the nerdiest way possible!
Lucy Fortson is an observational astrophysicist and a Professor of Physics at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Fortson is a cofounder of the Zooniverse, a Big Data collaboration focusing on problems with too much complex data for researchers alone to properly analyze-- everything from lions in the Serengeti and lions, to Higgs bosons and ancient texts from the Cairo Geniza. Zooniverse is the largest online citizen science platform in the world, with nearly 3 million participants on over 450 projects performing tasks like classification or marking, on images from camera traps in Tanzania to those from Astronomical Sky Surveys, helping to sort through massive data sets and contribute to making serendipitous discoveries within them.
Dr. Fortson’s lecture will take you on a quick tour of the engaging projects in the Zooniverse – from manuscripts from the Middle Ages to galaxies in the furthest reaches of time and space. Along the way, she will describe the issues that researchers now face with “Big Data”, what crowdsourcing is and how combining human intelligence with artificial intelligence is revolutionizing how science is being done.
Michael Coughlin is currently a McKnight Land-Grant Professor and Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on multi-messenger astronomy, working to bridge the gap between gravitational-wave and observational astronomers working in the electromagnetic regime. In this talk, he will explain how gravitational waves let us hear the universe—echoes from cosmic collisions like merging black holes and neutron stars. But what happens when we can see them too? We will explore how astronomers hunt for flashes of light—optical counterparts—that accompany these spacetime ripples. Discover how combining telescopes and gravitational wave detectors is unlocking new secrets about the universe, from the origins of heavy elements to the expansion of space itself.
Lindsay Glesener is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota and a 2020 McKnight Land-Grant Professorship winner. Dr. Glesener is also lead investigator on the FOXSI Sounding Rocket project, the first sub-orbital rocket project of its kind that images and explores energy release in solar flares. She also leads solar projects on high-altitude balloons and small satellites built by students. Her talk will focus on how the Sun controls the “space weather” of the Earth. Specifically, she’ll talk about how the Sun violently releases energy, particles, and plasma into interplanetary space (sometimes right at us!), how this can affect life on Earth, and what researchers and students at UMN are doing to better understand all this.
Patrick Kelly is an Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Minnesota Institute of Astrophysics (MIfA), as well as a recipient of both the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship (2022) and the Guillermo Borja Award (2023). Dr. Kelly's research focuses on using massive clusters of distant galaxies in space as a natural lens to bend and amplify light, which he has used to great success to find some of the most distant individual stars ever observed by researchers. In his lecture, he'll expand on how this technique has been used and what he has learned about the Universe in its earliest stages, the nature of dark matter, and more!
Keith Olive is the Gloria Becker Lubkin Chair in Theoretical Physics, William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, and is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor for the School of Physics and Astronomy's Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics. Prof. Olive's research is in the area of particle physics and cosmology.
Over the last few decades, our knowledge of Cosmology and the Universe around us has exploded. Through a series of land- and space-based observations, it has become possible to identify a Standard Cosmological Model. However, everything we see today was set up in the very early stages of the evolution of the Universe. For reference the age of the Universe is 13.6 billion years. But most all of the conditions leading to our present state were established when the Universe was less than a few minutes old! This lecture will explore the key events at those early times starting with the inflationary Universe which began when the age was an unimaginable fraction of a second old. Ideas behind the absence of antimatter, the formation of nuclei, and the eventual formation of galaxies' large scale structures will also be explored.