CHESTER, Vt. – Please join the Southern Vermont Astronomy Group (SoVerA) on Tuesday, Sept. 12, at 7 p.m., for a virtual monthly meeting. SoVerA is excited to host Dr. Josh Faber of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), who will be presenting on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).
This virtual meeting will be available at www.zoom.us/j/94691230307.
In this talk, Dr. Faber will talk about how LIGO is changing our view of what we can observe in the universe, and giving us new insights into how stars live and die. Focusing on neutron stars, he will explain how letting gravity crash them together pushes forward our understanding of nuclear physics, while happily creating many of the elements that make up both people and the world in which we live. Superlatives like “the most precise measurement of anything, ever” will be thrown about, and fun will be had by all.
Josh Faber grew up in Rochester, N.Y., and wanted to be an astronomer since seeing Cosmos at age 4. After attending Simon’s Rock College of Bard and the University at Stony Brook as an undergrad, he received his doctorate in physics from MIT. He joined the faculty of the School of Mathematical Sciences and Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation at RIT in 2007, and has been part of the Astrophysical Sciences and Technology doctorate program faculty since its inception. He has served as the head of the SMS for the past year, and is still trying to figure out how that happened too.