Physics

PHYSICS DEPARTMENT PRESENTS:
Ken Olum
Research Professor, Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
Tufts University

This event will take place in MBH 525.

Commencement Senior reception for Physic’s Department.

Launched in April 2018, NASA’s TESS mission is monitoring more than 200,000 stars and is expected to discover thousands of planets orbiting these stars. Stars chosen for the TESS survey are bright, making their planets’ properties relatively easy to characterize. These properties——including compositions of planetary atmospheres——will help scientists identify possibly habitable planets. Habitable candidates will be studied further with large ground-based telescopes and the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2021.

Auroral displays, or “Northern Lights” as they are called in this hemisphere, actually occur in both hemispheres.  Dr. Bering will share some of his experiences from his 6 trips to the Ice to study the aurora australis or “Southern Lights.” Auroras are a complex set of phenomena that are observable over a broad range of wavelengths from X-rays to radio waves.  Since auroras are localized, short lived phenomena, it is frequently easier to study them using ground-based observatories, balloons, and sounding rockets.