The Huachuca Astronomy Club will hold their March meeting in the Community Room of the Student Union Building, Cochise College Sierra Vista campus on March 18, 2016 at 7 PM.
Our speaker will be Maxwell Moe. Max received his PhD from Harvard University in 2015 and is currently a Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona’s Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory. His presentation is titled “The Cosmic Tango of Binary Stars”.
Abstract: Most of the brightest stars in the night sky are members of binary star systems. The stellar components in binaries can interact with each other and produce a plethora of astrophysical phenomena, including novae, X-ray binaries, millisecond pulsars, Type Ia supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, mergers of compact stellar remnants, and sources of gravitational waves. Despite their ubiquity, the formation and evolution of binary stars remain poorly understood. For example, Type Ia supernovae have produced most of the iron in the universe, and they have been utilized as standard candles to measure the acceleration of the universe, dark energy, and the cosmological constant. Although we have observational evidence that Type Ia supernovae derive from accreting and exploding white dwarfs, the donor binary companions to the white dwarfs are still not known. In my talk, I will share recent advances in binary star formation and evolution as well as highlight important questions that hopefully future missions can answer. I will conclude with a discussion of binary star evolution toward binary black holes, their inspiral via gravitational wave radiation, and the advanced LIGO detection.
Biography: Max grew up as an amateur astronomer under the dark skies outside Fort Collins, Colorado. While he has observed and sketched the Herschel 400 deep-sky objects, Max especially enjoys hunting down planetary nebulae in the summer sky. As an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, Max researched quasar outflows and the binary star interactions that shape planetary nebulae. He pursued his graduate studies at Harvard University, where he conducted both observational and theoretical research on eclipsing binaries, Type Ia supernovae, X-ray binaries, and peculiar transients. This past July, Max defended his Ph.D. thesis in astrophysics at Harvard University, entitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Eclipsing Binaries.” Max is currently an Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Arizona, where he continues to study various aspects of binary star formation and evolution. In his free time, Max enjoys biking, reading horrible science fiction, and hiking with his wife and five-month-old son.