2009 Lecture
 Thursday, May 14, 2009
Taking the Universe’s Baby Picture
An Evening with Professor David Spergel
Astronomy Department at Princeton University
at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History
Observations of the microwave background, the leftover heat from the Big Bang, are snapshots of the Universe only three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. These observations have answered many of the questions that have driven cosmology for the past few decades: How old is the Universe? What is its size and shape? What is the composition of the Universe? How do galaxies emerge? I will focus on results from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and from other recent cosmological experiments and show how they have addressed these questions.
While there has been significant progress, many key cosmological questions remain unanswered. What happened during the first moments of the Big Bang? What is the dark energy? What were the properties of the first stars? I will discuss how future observations may start to answer these new and deeper questions.
Dr. David Spergel is the Charles Young Professor of Astronomy and Chair of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1982 and his PhD from Harvard in 1985, where he worked with William Press and George Field on dark matter and cosmic strings. After two years as a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the Princeton faculty in 1987. He has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Maryland and the IAS. Spergel is a MacArthur fellow and has been awarded the Sloan Fellowship and the Presidential Young Investigator award. Time Magazine listed Spergel in its 2001 issue as one of America’s top scientist. Spergel is the first author of the most-cited paper published in the new millennium. He is a member of the KITP Advisory Board.
Spergel’s research interests have ranged from cosmology to the origin of life. His work has focused on addressing a wide range of questions in cosmology and astrophysics: What is the size and shape of the Universe? Is the Universe finite? What is the dark matter and dark energy that comprise most of the mass of the Universe? How do galaxies form and what determines their properties? How did our Galaxy form and evolve? Do the nearby stars harbor planets like our own Earth? Did life originate on Earth or come from nearby stars?
Spergel is a member of the WMAP science team. The recent WMAP results have provided a precision test of Big Bang cosmology and produced accurate measurements of the density of matter in the Universe, the age of the Universe and the amplitude of fluctuations that grew to form galaxies.
| ABOUT THE LAS CUMBRES OBSERVATORY LECTURES
The Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telesope Network (LCOGT), the Department of Physics at UC Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum (SBNHM) share an important and fundamental goal: education.
LCOGT is establishing a world-class outreach effort through construction of small telescope networks and an astronomical outreach website. The SBMNH places a high priority on public education, and astrophysics is an excellent field for this endeavor because of the intrinsic public appeal and the strong local community of amateur astronomers. The Department of Physics is building its efforts in astrophysics, and expanding the research horizons of our graduate students is a high priority.
Thanks to the generosity and support of LCOGT, over the next five years, these three organizations will partner to bring an eminent astrophysicist to Santa Barbara once a year. The astronomer will present a high profile public lecture in the Fleischmann Auditorium at the SBMNH, two graduate level lectures at UCSB to physics graduate students on the frontiers in the field, and interact with the scientific/outreach staff at LCOGT. These lectures will be taped and available for distribution by DVD and web-streaming.
This annual lecture series provides an opportunity for community members, students and scientists in Santa Barbara to interact with these high profile scientists from around the work and learn about the frontiers of the exciting fields of astrophysics and cosmology.
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