Members Night at the Observatory – All our members are welcome to come along no matter what age you are.
Book online to reserve your seat at https://mbo.org.au/events/category/members-events/
Please remember to book a ticket for each person who you are Booking for under your membership, including children. Thanks
Guest Speaker: Laura Driessen.
Radio Astronomer and Science Communicator, Dr Laura Driessen, will be live and exclusive via Zoom from Sydney to present another exciting topic on the 4th of July at 7.30pm.
Last year we were lucky to have Dr Driessen in person talking to us about ‘How Black Holes can Photobomb Stars’. This time she will be online to present another exciting topic – ‘The Dynamic Radio Sky’.
More about Dr Laura Driessen
I am a radio astronomer, science communicator, Superstar of STEM and brand ambassador for the Rise & Shine Kindergarten Orbit Centre of Imagination. I search for radio stars and am a project scientist (a team leader) of the Variables and Slow Transients Survey (VAST) alongside the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope team. We look for things that change in the sky, all the fun things like supernova explosions, pulsars, fast radio bursts, blackhole binaries, blackholes ripping things apart (tidal disruption events), flaring stars and even mystery objects that we have no idea what they are (yet). I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the Sydney Institute for Astronomy, at the University of Sydney.
Presentation -The Dynamic Radio Sky
Abstract: When we look up at the night sky every night, most things stay the same. The stars we’re used to are there like old friends. This is the same when we use radio telescopes to observe the sky. Most things are changing so slowly that they look the same over numerous human lifetimes. But if you look closely and observe the same patch of sky over and over, we do see things changing. Stars explode, black holes rip things apart, the interstellar medium ripples like clouds causing distant active galactic nuclei to flicker, and mysterious bursts arrive from many light years away. These changes can happen over a few milliseconds or over a few years. In this talk, I’ll share how we observe the changing radio sky and what we see. I’ll also share some exciting recent discoveries.
