Northwestern Physics and Astronomy student Shi Ye presents a talk as part of the Northwestern Ready Set Go (RSG) program. The goals of the program are to increase awareness for the urgent need for excellent research communicators and to coach graduate and post doctoral researchers to improve their own presentation skills. The program focuses on three important
Northwestern's RSG Program
About 130 million years ago, two neutron stars collided, unleashing an explosion that rippled space-time and splattered the cosmos with a cocktail of heavy metals. Astronomers announced that they spotted the signals from that “kilonova” explosion, both in gravitational waves like the ones LIGO previously detected from merging black holes, and in signals across the
Science Friday
This movie shows the evolution of a star 20 times more massive than our sun. The blue color of the star’s surface visible in the first frame is the result of this higher mass.
Credit: Stellar simulation by Vicky Kalogera, Bart Willems and Francesca Valsecchi. Visualization by Matthew McCrory. Funding: NSF and LIGO
This movie shows the evolution of a star as massive as our sun. Each star spends most of its life in a phase known as the main sequence, during which it burns hydrogen into helium at its center and it slowly expands (as the reference circles show) to accommodate the energy produced via this nuclear
Stellar simulation by Vicky Kalogera, Bart Willems and Francesca Valsecchi. Visualization by Matthew McCrory. / Funding: NSF and LIGO
This movie shows the evolution of a star 10 times more massive than our sun. The blue color of the star’s surface visible in the first frame is the result of this higher mass. Each star spends most of its life in a phase known as the main sequence, during which it burns hydrogen into
Credit: Stellar simulation by Vicky Kalogera, Bart Willems and Francesca Valsecchi. Visualization by Matthew McCrory. Funding: NSF and LIGO
Massive stars end their lives in powerful explosions (supernovae) that span a wide range of energies and properties. The most powerful of these are the appropriately named Superluminous Supernovae (SLSNe). As SLSNe are so bright and energetic, we can see them out to great distances in the universe, and they could prove to be very
Deanne Coppejans / Northwestern
Marked on this ALMA image are the locations and orientations of 11 gas outflows, which look like the bipolar lobes made by young protostars. These outflows are all within about 3 light-years of our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, marked with a star. Outflow #1 has the most obvious structure; the rest don’t show up well
ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Yusef-Zadeh et al.; B.Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
Most stars are born together in families of hundreds to thousands, known as star clusters. Over time, the pull of gravity from the galaxy can overcome the gravitational bond holding the family of stars together, shredding the star cluster apart. In this image, the lines show the paths of individual stars in a computer model
A. M. Geller and M. SubbaRao. CIERA/Northwestern
Gas-rich “proto-planetary” disks surround young, still forming stars, feeding them through accretion of dust and gas. These are the birthplaces of planetary systems. This image shows a simulation of a possible gas disk progenitor for the real exoplanetary system HR8799. Today, HR8799 has four, six-Jupiter-mass planets, 30 million years into their lives, surrounded by a
Aaron M. Geller and A. Dempsey. Simulation performed by A. Dempsey. CIERA/Northwestern
Binary systems are star systems comprising two stars orbiting around their common center of mass in a Keplerian orbit, which means that the two components are bound together by their mutual gravitational attraction. In this image, the binary system consists of a main sequence star like our sun, and a neutron star 1.4 times more
Northwestern. Stellar simulation by Vicky Kalogera, Bart Willems and Francesca Valsecchi. Visualization by Matthew McCrory.
