February Monthly Meeting: The Dark Universe

Please join the Hamilton Centre RASC for our February meeting, at 8:00 PM on Feb. 1, 2018. See below for location.

Members of the public are welcome.

Meeting Agenda

Besides our regular club business, we have four great reasons for you to attend.
1. “What’s Up in the Night Sky?” for February
2. Members are welcome to show off their astrophotography images and/or drawings.
Please bring jpegs on a USB stick and drawings on large paper
Please notify Ed Mizzi that you will have images to show.
3. 2018 RASC calendars will be sold…only $15 each.
4. Our guest speaker is highlighted below.

Dr. Laura Parker

Title: The Dark Universe

Abstract:

Observational astronomers use telescopes that look at the furthest distances in the Universe to look back in time and trace the growth of structure in the cosmos. Recent multi-wavelength measurements have helped us to constrain the components that make up the Universe and how those components evolve. We now know that most of the Universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, but the nature of these components remains largely unknown. In this talk Dr. Parker will give an overview of the techniques used to map the universe on the largest scales, which have enabled us to measure dark energy and dark matter.

Bio:

Dr. Laura Parker is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at McMaster University. Her research group is interested in questions related to galaxy evolution and observational cosmology. In particular her group is trying to understand the connection between observed galaxy properties and the properties of the environments in which we find them, including the relationship between galaxies and their host dark matter halos.

Dr. Parker completed her PhD in Physics at the University of Waterloo in 2005 and was then a postdoctoral fellow at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Munich before returning to Canada in 2007 to join the faculty at McMaster.

http://www.physics.mcmaster.ca/~lparker/

The meeting will be held at:

The Royal Canadian Legion Branch 551
79 Hamilton Street North, 2nd floor
Waterdown, Ontario  L0R 2H0

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