January 2020 Speaker: From Baby Planets to Black Holes: ALMA Explores the Cold Universe

Posted by as Meetings

Dr. Gerald Schieven, NRC Herzberg

7:30 PM Wednesday, January 8th, 2020 Room A104, Bob Wright Centre, UVic

The ALMA Observatory is a billion dollar multi-national astronomy facility located at high elevation in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. Its 66 antennas work together as if one giant telescope 16 km in diameter, to give us unprecedented images of the cold, dark universe, including the birth of planets around other stars, organic molecules in the early universe, and the first image of the event horizon of the super-massive black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy. Gerald will talk about the observatory, what it’s like to work there, and some of the astonishing discoveries being made by this facility.

Dr. Gerald Schieven has been a staff astronomer at NRC – Herzberg for 24 years (11 of them in Victoria), and is responsible for managing Canada’s support of the ALMA Observatory. After obtaining his PhD in Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts, Gerald worked at Queen’s University in Kingston, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii before moving to Victoria.

The picture of the ALMA antennas on the Chajnantor plain was taken a few days before the start of ALMA Early Science. Nineteen antennas are in operation, 5000 m above sea level.
Comments are closed.