The meeting will be held on June 8th in the Student Union Building at Cochise College 901 N. Colombo Avenue, Sierra Vista at 7pm
Dr. Chad Bender studies exoplanets to improve our understanding of how planets and planetary systems form and evolve. He and colleagues are currently building a pair of spectrometers that will search close- by stars for Earth sized planets that might be capable of supporting life.
Dr. Bender received his Ph.D. in 2006. He is currently an Associate Astronomer at The University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory
The first exoplanets discovered in 1993 paved the way for an astronomical revolution. The subsequent 25 years have revealed thousands of planets orbiting stars, with a diversity of characteristics not seen in our Solar System, nor even previously imagined. Over the past decade, astronomers have pushed detection sensitivities towards smaller and smaller planets and are now finally at the cusp of discovering Earth like planets around nearby stars. Dr. Bender will describe some of these discoveries, and the cutting-edge instrumentation and surveys that are finding them.
In his presentation, Dr. Sand talks about the ‘time domain’ revolution in astronomy, and how we are finding new ways to study stars that merge, burp and explode by looking at their imprints on space-time via gravitational waves. He will highlight recent results on the gravitational wave detection of the merger of two neutron stars and look to the future of this field. Dr. Sand’s interest in things that go bump in the night led to his team’s search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves.
Our April 13th meeting at 7pm in the Student Union, Cochise College Sierra Vista features a talk by Dr. Kevin Hainline.
Our March 9 meeting at 7pm in the Student Union, Cochise College Sierra Vista features a talk by Dr. Nick Ballering.