Noted astronomer John Huchra of Harvard
University will present a public
astronomy talk, “The State of the Universe Report,” on Wednesday, Feb. 23, at 8 p.m. in the F.W. Olin Center Auditorium.
His talk, which is free and open to the public, is
sponsored by the Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships Program of the American
Astronomical Society. There will be a reception after the talk in the Olin
rotunda and an open house in the Union College Observatory.
Huchra will discuss why our best model of the Universe,
the hot Big Bang, has recently been put on a much firmer footing by advanced
observations, especially those of the Hubble Space Telescope. We have what just
might be the final answer on the age and fate of the Universe and the basic
parameters of our cosmological model, he says. Or do we? Ninety-five percent of
the content of the Universe has only been inferred from theory and observations
but remains undetected. Huchra will tell us where we are, how we got there and
what problems remain.
Huchra is senior astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics and the Robert
O. and Holly Thomis Doyle Professor of Cosmology at Harvard University.
He is well known for his work with Harvard collaborator Margaret Geller on
measuring the distribution of galaxies in the Universe. Together they showed that
galaxies are not distributed randomly in the Universe, but rather inhabit
filamentary structures around voids of relatively low galaxy density.
Huchra's visit is made possible by the Harlow Shapley
Visiting Lectureships Program of the American Astronomical Society, which
sponsors two-day visits by professional astronomers to college campuses. The
program is named in honor of the astronomer Harlow Shapley, a renowned public
lecturer and educator, whose research disproved the theory that our solar system
is located in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.