The speaker will be Megan Kiminki. Megan is a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona. Megan received a B.S. in Astronomy and Biology from the University of Wyoming in 2010, and an M.S. in Astronomy from the University of Arizona in 2012. Her research interests include star formation, massive stars, stellar kinematics, optical spectroscopy, and the development of user-friendly data analysis tools.
Megan’s talk will be entitled “Eta Carinae, the Supernova Impostor: A Tale of Three Cosmic Eruptions”.
In the mid-1800s, the enormous but previously inconspicuous star Eta Carinae grew brighter and brighter, eventually outshining all other stars but Sirius, before fading again over several decades. Astronomers had witnessed a “supernova impostor,” a star that erupts in a violent outburst without destroying itself in the process. Eta Carinae today is surrounded by gaseous debris flying outward at more than a million miles per hour. Studying that debris, Megan and her colleagues have learned that this mysterious star’s history goes back much farther than they thought: it has erupted not once but three times in the past thousand years. In this talk, she will discuss these results and their implications for our understanding of very massive stars.