University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Webster Cash will continue the Fall 2000 Chancellor聮s Community Lecture Series on Wednesday, Dec. 13, with a presentation on "Cosmic Journeys: Visiting Stars and Black Holes with the Telescopes of the Future."
A professor in the department of astrophysical and planetary sciences, Cash will talk about the next generations of X-ray telescopes in space, which will be able to provide extremely high resolutions of distant stellar objects.
The talk is at 7 p.m. in the chapel at The Academy, 970 Aurora Ave., in Boulder.
Cash recently led a team that designed and developed a prototype X-ray telescope observatory, considered by experts to be the largest scientific leap in the 40-year-old field of X-ray astronomy.
The new X-ray observatory design, known as MAXIM, is expected to exceed the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope by 300,000 times and allow astrophysicists to peer into voracious black holes and image distant stars that now are only seen as distant points of light. The observatory should be able to image an object as small as a frisbee on the sun, which is roughly 93 million miles away, he said.
"A million-fold increase in X-ray resolution over today聮s instruments will make objects in distant stellar systems appear as if they are here in our own solar system," said Cash. "We will see the discs of stars, image the formation of astrophysical jets and watch blobs of matter spiral into black holes."
Although the MAXIM X-ray observatory is at least a decade away from launch, NASA is intrigued enough to have tentatively scheduled two future agency missions using the new technology sometime after 2010. The MAXIM observatory uses a technique called interferometry to combine signals from up to 33 tiny spacecraft flying in formation followed by a detector spacecraft that will gather and combine the light for each telescope.
All talks will be at 7 p.m. in the Chapel at The Academy, located at 970 Aurora Ave. in Boulder. Monthly lectures are free and open to the public. The program is co-sponsored by The Academy and the CU-Boulder Office of Community Affairs on Wednesday evenings once a month from September through January.
The series continues the community program launched in September 1998 that brings CU-Boulder faculty into the community for talks ranging from arts and humanities to business and the sciences.
Parking is available along the streets that border The Academy: Lincoln, Cascade, Aurora and 10th. For more information, contact the CU-Boulder Office of Community Affairs at (303) 492-8384.