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Physics Department Colloquium
Rapture of the Deep Sky
Date: Friday, September 19th
Time: 4:00 pm
Place: 2241 Chamberlin Hall (coffee at 3:30 pm)
Speaker: Professor Melville P. Ulmer, Department of Physics & Astronomy, Northwestern University
Abstract: Astronomers have become "drunk" like deep sea divers with observations of the deep (faint object) sky. This has lead to a host of telescopes that enable us to see fainter and fainter than ever before. The majority of astronomers have focused on finding the most distant objects, but exciting science can be done by going fainter besides pushing to the edges of the Universe. I will show how I have taken advantage of the ability to detect faint sky objects to study clusters of galaxies. These are exceedingly interesting objects that allow us to engage some of the key issues of physics today, such as Dark Energy and Cold Dark Matter (CDM). Clusters are also natural places to learn about the origin and evolution of both galaxies and the large scale structure of the Universe. I will describe how clusters can be a used to address the nature of Dark Energy as well as what clusters already have to say about Dark Matter.

Bio: Mel Ulmer is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. He is a member of the American Astronomical Society, the American Physical Society, the International Astronomical Union, and the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers, and the Royal Astronomical Society. He has served on executive councils for the high energy astrophysics divisions of both American Astronomical Society and the American Physical Society, as well as several NASA advisory and review panels. He has published over 250 articles in journals and conference proceeding on topics including the study of binary X-ray sources, pulsars, and the large scale structure of the Universe. He has also worked in areas of technology development and has written papers on GaN-based films, multilayer super-conducting tunnel junctions, X-ray mirror fabrication, and light weight optical mirror fabrication. He received a B.A.in Physics from The Johns Hopkins University ('65) and a Ph.D. in Physics (Bill Kraushaar advisor, '70) from The Univ of Wisconsin-Madison.

http://www.astro.northwestern.edu/~ulmer/
Host: Barger
Poster: https://www.physics.wisc.edu/events/posters/2008/1205.pdf
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