AP/Physics Colloquium

Women in Astrophysics

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Location

Campus, Hewlett Teaching Center, 200

(in-person attendance limited to Stanford affiliates)

Speaker
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (University of Oxford) In Person

More information

There are proportionally more women in astrophysics than in many other branches of physics, but they are still in a minority.  For many years the IAU (International Astrophysical Union)   has recorded separately its male and female membership. Using this data base I will review how the fraction of astrophysicists that are female has varied with time and by country.

The Physics of the Cult Movie Interstellar

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Location

Campus, Hewlett Teaching Center, 201

Speaker
Kip Thorne (Caltech) In Person

Christopher Nolan’s cult science fiction film Interstellar (2014) sprang from a treatment co-authored by physicist Kip Thorne, and so had real science — both firm and speculative — embedded in it from the outset.  The film’s venue is what Thorne calls “The Warped Side of our Universe”:  objects and phenomena made, at least in part, from warped spacetime, such as black holes, wormholes, spacetime singularities, time travel, gravitational waves, gravitational lensing, gravitational slingshots, solitary ocean waves driven by tidal gravitational forces, and braneworlds (general relativity in fi

The Deep Synoptic Array: fast radio burst probes of the unseen universe

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Location

Campus, Hewlett Teaching Center, Rm. 201

Speaker
Vikram Ravi (Caltech Astronomy) In Person Only

The origins of fast radio bursts (FRBs) at extragalactic distances remain shrouded in mystery. FRBs nonetheless form exquisite tracers of the contents and physical conditions of baryons along their sightlines. For example, FRBs are dispersed in intervening plasma columns, and these columns are typically dominated by gas around and in between galaxies. Much of the cosmic baryon content is locked in this hot (>10^6 K) and diffuse (<10^-3 cm^-3) phase, making it difficult to observe the processes whereby galaxies grow out of and impact their baryonic environments.