Agenda:
7:00 - 7:15 General Meeting & Announcements
7:15 - 7:30 Short topic presentation by a club member
7:30 - 7:45 Refreshment break
7:45 - Public Presentation
Speaker: Dr. Terry Oswalt, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Title: White Dwarfs - Prospecting in the Stellar Graveyard
Abstract:
The bright star Sirius has a faint companion star, about the mass of the sun, but more like a planet in size. Such stars, called white dwarfs, are many thousands of times denser than matter which can be studied in terrestrial laboratories. Astrophysicists know white dwarfs are the fate of nearly all existing stars. They are a class of dying stars that no longer can generate energy, but merely cooling slowly to invisibility. Thus, the oldest white dwarfs are the remains of the first generation of stars in the solar neighborhood. Dr. Oswalt will discuss the life cycle of stars, his studies of the white dwarf stars and the constraints these results place on the age of the Galaxy and Universe.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Terry D. Oswalt is Professor and Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He earned his Ph.D. in Astronomy at The Ohio State University specializing in studies of binary star systems, late stages of stellar evolution, minor planets, and comets. Oswalt teaches physics and astronomy courses at all levels while continuing his primary research interests in stellar astrophysics.
Oswalt is the founding Chairman of the Southeast Association for Research in Astronomy, a consortium of 15 institutions that operate remote-access telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in Chile, and Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos in the Canary Islands. He also has been director of the SARA summer internship program, which brought undergraduate students from around the U.S. to do research at the SARA facility at Kitt Peak each summer for 18 years. In recognition of his astronomical research and work in founding the SARA consortium, Dr. Oswalt was named the 2010 Florida Academy of Science Medalist. He is a member of the International Astronomical Union, Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society, Fellow of the American Astronomical Society and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (UK).
For over 20 years, Dr. Oswalt has been a Harlow Shapley lecturer for the American Astronomical Society and Councilor of the Physics and Astronomy Division of the Council on Undergraduate Research. In addition to having served on numerous governmental advisory committees, he has been a program officer for Stellar Astronomy & Astrophysics at the National Science Foundation. Dr. Oswalt has published over 250 scientific articles and has edited nine books, the most recent of which is a six-volume series of astronomy reference books “Planets, Stars & Stellar Systems.”
