DATE:

Friday, September 25, 2020

TIME:

3:00 PM

LOCATION:

Virtual Zoom Conference

SPEAKER:

Dr. Fridolin Weber, Physics, San Diego State University

ABSTRACT:

Understanding the life of massive stars and their evolution after stellar death is a challenging multi-disciplinary research activity which brings together observational, experimental, theoretical, and computational researchers. The stellar systems which they attempt to model are extremely complex and involve physical processes which operate over enormous temperature and density scales, which, on Earth, can only be produced in the powerful particle accelerators. The focus of this talk will be on three types of “dead” stars – white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. Galaxies such as the Milky Way are filled with hundreds of millions of such objects. They possess most unusual properties which carry information about the fundamental

building blocks of matter, the fundamental forces of nature, and even of the structure of space-time itself. Combined with the unprecedented advances in observational astronomy, this makes “dead” stars superb astrophysical laboratories for a broad range of fascinating physical/computational studies, as discussed in this talk.

HOST:

Jose Castillo

VIDEO: