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. Jamie Tayar
Title: Landolt Artificial Star
Abstract:
The recently approved Landolt NASA Space Mission will place an artificial “star” in orbit to allow scientists to calibrate telescopes and more accurately measure the brightness of stars ranging from those nearby to the distant explosions of supernova in far-off galaxies. By establishing absolute flux calibration, the mission will begin to address several open challenges in astrophysics including the speed and acceleration of the universe expansion. The artificial star will have eight lasers shining at ground optical telescopes in order to calibrate them for observations, and although not bright enough to see with the naked eye, it will be observable with amateur telescopes. At an altitude of 22,236-miles, this geosynchronous orbit will ensure the satellite will be constantly over the United States.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Tayar graduated from Caltech in 2012 with a B.Sc in astronomy, then earned her astronomy M.SC in 2014 and Ph.D in 2018 both at The Ohio State University. She was then a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa before becoming an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida in 2022. She is interested in stars, how they grow, how they change, and what that tells us about the physics going on inside them. She works both on the theory of stars, thinking about how to make better models of their structure and evolution, as well as on observations, using large datasets of photometry from the ground and space as well as high-resolution spectroscopy to precisely and accurately characterize these stars. She also uses asteroseismology, the study of stellar oscillations, to tell us about the internal structure of stars.
Research Interests:
Stellar Physics and Evolution