Guest Speaker: Dr. Shane Larson

Shane Larson is a research professor of physics at Northwestern University, where he is the Associate Director of CIERA (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics).

He works in gravitational wave astrophysics, specializing in studies of compact stars, binaries, and the galaxy with the ground-based LIGO project and future space-based observatory LISA. He grew up in Eastern Oregon and was formerly a tenured associate professor of physics at Utah State University. He is an award-winning teacher and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is an avid amateur astronomer, observing with two homebuilt Dobsonians, a 12.5" named EQUINOX and a 22" named COSMOS MARINER. He contributes regularly to a public science blog at writescience.wordpress.com, and tweets with the handle @sciencejedi.

Presentation

A Storm of Stars: Knowing the Milky Way from Star Counts to Gravitational Waves

For most of human history, we have been aware of the Milky Way, but it is comparatively recent that we have come to understand the Milky Way is our parent galaxy, a vast swirling storm of stars 10 billion years in the making. The story of how we came to understand our home galaxy is one of the central threads in the story of how we have come to understand the Universe far beyond. Historically our ideas about the nature and structure of the Cosmos have grown out of our attempts to understand the Milky Way. For hundreds of years, we didn't know what the Milky Way was or even that there were other galaxies besides the Milky Way. In this talk, we'll examine the discovery of the Milky Way and talk about how our perceptions of the Milky Way constantly shape and change our understanding of other galaxies and the Cosmos on much larger scales. There are still some secrets the galaxy hides from us, providing astronomers with puzzles and challenges to work on for many years yet to come.