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Sturm Memorial Lecture

In memory of Kenneth E. Sturm, a Wesleyan alumnus, this annual event is held in the spring and is open to the public. It features a presentation from an astronomer that is outstanding in their field and able to communicate the excitement of science to a lay audience. The event is free and open to anyone.

Speaker: Dr. Adam Riess, Thomas J. Barber Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, and Distinguished Astronomer, Space Telescope Science Institute

 

In 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered that our Universe is expanding. Eighty years later, the Space Telescope which bears his name is being used to study an even more surprising phenomenon, that the expansion is speeding up.  The origin of this effect is not known, but is broadly attributed to a type of "dark energy" first posited to exist by Albert Einstein and now dominating the mass-energy budget of the Universe. Dr. Riess will describe how his team discovered the acceleration of the Universe and why understanding the nature of dark energy presents one of the  greatest remaining challenges in astrophysics and cosmology.

Adam Riess is the Thomas J. Barber Professor in Space Studies at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, a distinguished astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2011, he was named a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal for his leadership in the High-z Supernova Search Team’s discovery that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating, a phenomenon widely attributed to a mysterious, unexplained “dark energy” filling the universe. The discovery was named by Science magazine in 1998 as “the Breakthrough Discovery of the Year.” His accomplishments have been recognized with a number of other awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, the Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize in 2007 (shared) and the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2006.

Date: Thursday, April 18, 2013, 7:30PM

Where: CFA Hall, Wesleyan University

Reception and telescope viewing at the Van Vleck Observatory to follow the lecture.

Past Speakers

Year	Guest Speaker	Title of presentation
2012	Dr. Alan Title, Lockheed Martin/Stanford University	"Making the Invisible Sun Visible"
2011	Dr. John Mather, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center	"History of the Universe in a Nutshell: From the Big Bang to Life and the End of Time"
2010	Dr. Jill Tarter, SETI Institute	"Are We Alone?"
2009	Dr. Taft Armandroff, W.M. Keck Observatory	"Frontier Science with the World's Largest Telescope"
2008	Dr. Steven Squyres, Cornell University	"Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet"
2007	Dr. Alex Filippenko, University of California, Berkeley	"Dark Energy and the Runaway Universe"
2006	Dr. David Spergel, Princeton University	"Taking the Baby Picture of the Universe"
2005	Dr. Charles Bailyn, Yale Univesity	"How to See a Black Hole"
2004	Dr. Alyssa Goodman, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics	"Making Stars"
2003	Dr. David J. Helfand, Columbia University	"How Superman Saw the Stars"
2002	Dr. Neta Bahcall, Princeton University	"The Dark Side of the Universe"
2001	Dr. Robert Williams, Distinguished Research Scholar of the Space Telescope Science Institute	"Through The Looking Glass: The Universe Seen With Hubble Space Telescope"
2000	Dr. Geoff Marcy, University of California, Berkeley	"Cosmic Oases: New Worlds and Life in the Universe"
1998	Dr. Martha Haynes, Cornell University	"Dark Matter and the Future of the Universe"
1997	Dr. Margaret Geller, Harvard University	"So Many Galaxies... So Little Time..."
1996	Dr. David Latham, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics	"Searching for Planets"
1995	Dr. Robert Kirshner, Chairman of Astronomy Department at Harvard University	"Taking Measure of the Universe: How Big? How Old? How Do We Know?"
1994	Dr. Owen Gingrich, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics	"Hypothesis, Proof, and the Censors, or How Galileo Changed the Rules of Science."
1993	Dr. Stephen Strom, University of Massachusetts	"The Formation of Stars and Solar Systems"
1992	Dr. Vera Rubin, Carnegie Institution of Washington	"What Newton Didn't Know About the Universe"
1991	Dr. Jay Pasachoff, Williams College	"The Sun and Solar Eclipses"