Our Monthly meeting at the USM Planetarium, 7PM, on the first Thursday of each month unless otherwise noted.
Dear SMA Members and Friends,
We have a remarkable speaker for our October meeting – Dr. Morgan MacLeod. I’ll get to his talk in a minute. Before Morgan had Ph.D after his name he was a Greely High School student looking for help on an astronomy science project and approached SMA. He became a mentee of Paul Howell, one of SMA’s directors and founders. Paul worked with Morgan on a variable star project in which Morgan confirmed a new variable star. The rest is history: Morgan went on to Bowdoin College, pursuing a degree in computational astrophysics and then was admitted to UC Santa Cruz where he obtained his doctorate. Morgan was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He is currently an Einstein Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where he is enjoying developing computational models to study moments of dramatic binary star interaction. I was going to say Morgan has had a “meteoric rise” in his pursuit of astronomy but then heard a radio commentator on NPR say that “people who say that don’t understand meteors!” so I guess I’ll leave it that Morgan has come a long way from that Greely High School science project and we are delighted to have him back as Dr. MacLeod!
His talk: Stellar Mergers in the Transient Night Sky
As close pairs of stars evolve and change in size, one star can engulf its companion on the way to a stellar merger. These moments of engulfment disturb and transform the stellar system. For several weeks or months, the stars become extremely luminous -- so much so that they are apparent even in other galaxies. I will share recent discoveries of the observational signatures of merging pairs of stars and talk about efforts to create computational models of the gas dynamics of stellar coalescence.
As always, the meeting is at the Southworth Planetarium on the USM Campus at Falmouth Street. The doors open at 6:30 p.m. for coffee and socializing and the program begins at 7 p.m.
Posted by: "Robert Burgess" <rburgess250@comcast.net>
We have a remarkable speaker for our October meeting – Dr. Morgan MacLeod. I’ll get to his talk in a minute. Before Morgan had Ph.D after his name he was a Greely High School student looking for help on an astronomy science project and approached SMA. He became a mentee of Paul Howell, one of SMA’s directors and founders. Paul worked with Morgan on a variable star project in which Morgan confirmed a new variable star. The rest is history: Morgan went on to Bowdoin College, pursuing a degree in computational astrophysics and then was admitted to UC Santa Cruz where he obtained his doctorate. Morgan was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. He is currently an Einstein Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where he is enjoying developing computational models to study moments of dramatic binary star interaction. I was going to say Morgan has had a “meteoric rise” in his pursuit of astronomy but then heard a radio commentator on NPR say that “people who say that don’t understand meteors!” so I guess I’ll leave it that Morgan has come a long way from that Greely High School science project and we are delighted to have him back as Dr. MacLeod!
His talk: Stellar Mergers in the Transient Night Sky
As close pairs of stars evolve and change in size, one star can engulf its companion on the way to a stellar merger. These moments of engulfment disturb and transform the stellar system. For several weeks or months, the stars become extremely luminous -- so much so that they are apparent even in other galaxies. I will share recent discoveries of the observational signatures of merging pairs of stars and talk about efforts to create computational models of the gas dynamics of stellar coalescence.
As always, the meeting is at the Southworth Planetarium on the USM Campus at Falmouth Street. The doors open at 6:30 p.m. for coffee and socializing and the program begins at 7 p.m.
Posted by: "Robert Burgess" <rburgess250@comcast.net>
Date: Thursday, October 3, 2019
Time: 7 p.m. - 9 p.m. Eastern
Location:
Southworth Planetarium
96 Falmouth Street
Portland, ME 04103
