CfA Observatory Night Lecture on March 19th!
On March 19th I’ll be the speaker at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics monthly “Observatory Night” for the public! I’m extremely excited about this – I love giving public talks and trying to pass on enthusiasm for astronomy and science to an interested audience. I’ll be talking about GRBs and how GRB astronomy is conducted, with special attention paid to GRB 080319B, the outstandingly bright gamma-ray burst that occurred on March 19th, 2008 (exactly one year before the talk!*) and was visible to the naked eye despite its origin from a dying star 7.5 billion light years away. The title of the talk, “The Second Biggest Bang?”, was fine when I first gave a version of it last April in Hawaii, at the Institute for Astronomy’s Open House, but it was rendered obsolete about four days ago thanks to a press release on the tremendous GRB 080916C. Oh well: I figure it’s a good opportunity to demonstrate to people the timescales that science can sometimes work on, and how quickly we’re discovering new things in the current age of astronomy!
The lecture will be in Phillips Auditorium at the rear of the CfA complex, which is located at 60 Garden Street in Cambridge. It’ll also be webcast if anyone is interested! And hopefully the skies will be clear that night so everyone can do some rooftop observing afterward!
*When we were scheduling the talk I was given one date in February, one in March, and one in April. The date in March was just too perfect to pass up!
