Profs and Pints Charlottesville presents: “New Views of the Universe,” a look at the previously unseen realms and phenomena revealed by space telescopes, with Jack Singal, associate professor of physics at the University of Richmond and former researcher at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Stanford University.
[All tickets must be purchased online with sales tax and processing fees added. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/charlottesville-universe .]
The images being produced by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have reignited interest in the frontiers of astronomy. But its voyage is just the latest in a series of remarkable space telescope missions, dating back almost to the dawn of the space age, that have revolutionized our understanding of the universe and what happens in it.
Come to the Graduate by Hilton Charlottesville for a look at how telescopes that see forms of light invisible to our eyes are showing us distant galaxies and amazing phenomena that we never knew existed before, and even letting us see things as they were far back in time.
Your guide on this journey, Dr. Jack Singal, is an astrophysicist whose career has involved studying the universe in all different kinds of light, including radio waves, microwaves, ultraviolet light, X-rays, and gamma rays.
Professor Singal will discuss the history of space telescope missions and how these instruments’ ability to detect different forms of light has yielded revelations that changed our views of the universe and our place in it. If you’ve ever wondered how we know, for example, that the universe is full of mysterious dark matter, or how we can see what things were like 14 billion years ago, then this talk will provide some answers.
You’ll walk out after the talk and look up at the night sky with a bigger sense of wonder. (Advance tickets: $13.50. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open to talk attendees at 4:30 pm and the talk itself starts at 6 pm.)
Image: “Pillars of Creation,” an infrared image of a star-forming region captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. (Photo by NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI / Creative Commons.)
