Our May 18th meeting at 7pm in the Student Union, Cochise College Sierra Vista features a talk by Dr. David Sand.

Dr. Sand will give a presentation titled: Gravitational Waves and Things that Go Boom in the Night

In his presentation, Dr. Sand talks about the ‘time domain’ revolution in astronomy, and how we are finding new ways to study stars that merge, burp and explode by looking at their imprints on space-time via gravitational waves.  He will highlight recent results on the gravitational wave detection of the merger of two neutron stars and look to the future of this field. Dr. Sand’s interest in things that go bump in the night led to his team’s search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves.Continue reading→

Our April 13th meeting at 7pm in the Student Union, Cochise College Sierra Vista features a talk by Dr. Kevin Hainline.

Dr. Hainline is an astronomer and researcher on the James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam science team at Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on hunting for active galaxies and quasars and understanding the effects of a growing, powerful supermassive black hole on its host galaxy. Currently, he is helping to plan the initial deep observations to be done by JWST to explore the evolution of the earliest galaxies. He received his PhD from UCLA in 2012 and spent three years as a researcher and professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, before moving to Tucson to work on JWST. Kevin has a passion for science outreach education, speaking about astronomy any chance he can get. Kevin is very enthusiastic.

Continue reading→

Our March 9 meeting at 7pm in the Student Union, Cochise College Sierra Vista features a talk by Dr. Nick Ballering.

Nick is a postdoctoral research associate in astronomy at the University of Arizona, Steward Observatory. He received his B.S. in astronomy and physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He then attended graduate school at the University of Arizona under the guidance of professor George Rieke, receiving his PhD in 2016.   His research interests revolve around exoplanetary systems. What is their architecture? How do they form? How common or rare is our solar system? Nick works to answer these questions by observing circumstellar disks.

Continue reading→