[AstroNet] Public lecture in Cape Town: How stars and planets form

[Kevin Govender]

Speaker: Debra Shepherd from NRAO/ALMA
Venue: MTN Sciencentre, Canal Walk
Date : Wednesday, 11 March
Time: 18:30 for 19:00

There is no cost to attend these talks, organised in partnership with
Square Kilometre Array South Africa (SKA SA)

Phone the MTN Sciencentre on 021 529 8100 to book your seat. The venue
holds 200, ~66 places booked so far.

Title:     "How stars and planets form"

Abstract:

Have you ever wondered how stars form?  Why are there planets around our
own star, the Sun?  Do other stars have Earth-like planets, and if so, how
many?  We don't know all the answers to these questions but we are
beginning to travel the road to discovery.

We will start our tour of cosmic nurseries inside dark, interstellar
clouds of gas and dust - the birth place of stars and planets.  Dust
obscures our view in visible light but we can use radio telescopes to peer
into the depths of cloud cores.  Young stars are unstable,
sending out spectacular jets that eventually blast the cloud apart.
Surrounding these young stars are disks of rotating material that may form
a planetary system.  More than 150 planets have been found around other
stars but none are like the Earth (although one gets close!). Is it
because Earth-like planets are very rare?  Or are our telescopes and
search techniques not powerful enough to see such small, rocky bodies yet?
     Together we will explore these questions and see some of the most
breath-taking images of our Galaxy.

Bio:

In 1981, with a Bachelors degree in physics, I began my career as a
research engineer.  I spent 10 years as an engineer working on, among
other things, space-based sensors and training astronauts for Space Lab
shuttle missions while getting a Masters degree in astrophysics. In 1991 I
went back to school and received a doctorate in Astronomy at the
University of Wisconsin.  I then worked at the California Institute of
Technology (CalTech) studying how stars more massive than our sun formed
and helping to run the Owens Valley Millimeter Observatory.   From there I
joined the scientific staff at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory
(NRAO).   I am now a tenured astronomer at NRAO doing astronomical
research on star and planet formation and helping to test and commission
software for the the
Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) - a radio telescope array being
built in Chile.