A Sharper Image: Seeing Colliding Galaxies with Adaptive Optics

When light from space enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it is distorted and displaced, something our eyes perceive as “twinkling.”  A new technique, called adaptive optics, can remove a great deal of this distortion, essentially restoring much of the detail we’ve been robbed off in our view of the star and galaxies.  Dr. Max, a world-renowned pioneer in this technique, will show us how modern lasers allow her to do this very precisely.  And she’ll show us how this is giving us sharper views of such cosmic events as the collision of nearby galaxies.  Since such galaxies often have giant black holes in their centers, which can interact, adaptive optics allows us to gather new information about these mysterious objects as well.

Speaker: Dr. Claire Max, Director of the University of California Observatories

We get large crowds for these talks, so we ask people to try to arrive a little bit early to find parking.  The lecture is free, but there is a charge of $3 for parking on campus and exact change is appreciated.

Past lectures in the series can be found on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/SVAstronomyLectures