Live Faculty Talks
Join us for unique and thought provokingÌýlive talks throughout the year.
The University of Colorado at Boulder is a Tier 1 research university and employs many of the world's expert scientists.
This lecture series provides a great opportunity to hear from these leading researchers about their work andÌýthe impactÌýon the scientific communityÌýand our society as a whole.
These are a part ofÌýour regular talk series. Regular ticket prices apply.Ìý
CU Boulder students are admitted FREE on THURSDAY NIGHT TALKS with valid Buff OneCard.Ìý
Upcoming Live Faculty Talks
Galilean Moons: Past, Present, FutureÌý
OCTOBER 24 & 25 atÌý7PM
As Juno’s orbit has evolved over 8 years, the spacecraft has also made flybys of the Galilean moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. This provides an opportunity to review the history of the Galilean moons, discuss previous observations made byÌý,Ìý,ÌýÌý²¹²Ô»åÌýÌýmissions to provide the context for recentÌýÌýflybys. Looking to the future,ÌýÌý²¹²Ô»åÌýÌýmissions will be probing deeper into these very different worlds.
Ìýis a senior research scientist and professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is co-investigator and team leader of the plasma investigations on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Juno mission to Jupiter. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields and the interaction of plasmas with the atmospheres of planetary objects, particularly in the outer solar system. She edited the monographÌýJupiter: Planet, Satellites and MagnetosphereÌý(Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Born and raised in the UK, Dr. Bagenal received her bachelor degree in Physics and Geophysics from the University of Lancaster, England, and her doctorate degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT (Cambridge, Mass) in 1981. She spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, London, before returning to the United States for research and faculty positions in Boulder, Colorado. She has participated in several of NASA's planetary exploration missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno.
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Mapping the Milky Way
NOVEMBER 7 & 8ÌýatÌý7PM
For centuries, humans have used the stars as guides to navigate the globe and construct maps of the Earth. These maps help us understand our planet, its history, and its patterns. By observing the night sky, we can extend our map to the stars, charting their location and movement in two dimensions on the celestial sphere. But how do we map the stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, in three dimensions when we can't travel beyond our own solar system? What might we learn about our galaxy, its origin, and its evolution from these three-dimensional maps?
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Join us for this live talk where we will explore our Milky Way galaxy in 3D with data collected from missions like and the . We'll learn how astronomers map the Milky Way from the Earth and discover patterns in the stars' chemical properties that teach us about our Galaxy's history. Along the way we'll uncover how different types of stellar explosions produce the elements on the periodic table and create chemical patterns across space.
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Dr. Emily Griffith is a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy at CU Boulder. By studying spectra of the stars, she researches the origin of the elements and the properties of the astronomical events that create them. She is a member of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a collaboration that is taking spectra of millions of stars in the Milky Way.
Watch this space for more amazing talks at Fiske.