2023 Oppenheimer Lecture featuring Lars Bildsten
Monday, March 6, 2023 at 5:30 pm
Chevron Auditorium at International House
A Reception was held at 4:00 pm
View photos from the event HERE
Hearing the Stars: New Insights into Stellar Interiors
Space-based observations have provided a remarkable new tool for studying stars within our galaxy, the Milky Way. Simply by measuring how bright a star is over many years, we can now directly measure its mass and radius, as well as the properties of its deep interior, such as the rate of rotation. This has been done for tens of thousands of stars across the Milky Way, also allowing us to unravel how the galaxy was formed over cosmic time. It's a great story of how theory and observation, together, can make a remarkable impact on our understanding of the universe.
Lars Bildsten
Lars Bildsten is the Director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) and the Gluck Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from Cornell University in 1991. Dr. Bildsten is a theoretical astrophysicist recognized for his work on the properties and behaviors of stars, both when they are burning their thermonuclear fuel for billions of years and when they explode as supernova or emit gravitational waves. (He was at Caltech for three years as the Lee A. DuBridge Research Fellow and was an assistant and associate professor in both the Physics and Astronomy departments at University of California, Berkeley.)