Stop the Presses!….we have a wonderful change in speakers for tomorrow night’s Monthly meeting.
Dr. Paul Delaney, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at York University has graciously accepted our invitation to speak at tomorrow night’s meeting.
His Topic “Update on Recent Exoplanetary Research”
“In excess of 4000 exoplanets have been discovered to date and they grow in numbers on a daily and hourly basis. Great advances have occurred in atmospheric determination and the existence of water on some of these planets. We will be discussing the latest results from the Kepler Telescope, which is designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way to discover dozens of Earth-size extrasolar planets in or near the habitable zone and estimate how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets, Kepler’s sole instrument is a photometer that continually monitors the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view. This data is transmitted to Earth, then analyzed to detect periodic dimming caused by extrasolar planets that cross in front of their host star. One of the exciting parts is that amateur astronomers are involved in analyzing some of the data as part of the “Citizen Science” program.
Be sure to come out and invite your friends…this promises to be a meeting you won’t want to miss!
See you tomorrow evening at the Royal Canadian Legion in Waterdown at 8pm!
