Join us for an exciting night of talks about astronomy at our eighth event of Astronomy on Tap Triangle, our North Carolina chapter of short, engaging talks about astronomy over beer! Our events are free and open to all ages, held at the taproom of Fullsteam Brewery in Durham, NC.
On Tuesday May 1 we’ll celebrate our first full orbit — we have been holding events at Fullsteam in Durham for exactly one year! We’ll hear from two professional astronomers in the Triangle about both black holes and the habitability of exoplanets! Dr. Kate Scholberg*, Professor of Physics at Duke University, will tell us how we can view the birth of a black hole from vast vats of liquid underground. Ward Howard**, a graduate student at UNC Chapel Hill, will explain his recent discovery of a superflare on the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, and how these massive flares could make it’s Earth-mass planet inhospitable to life.
*Dr. Kate Scholberg is a Professor of Physics at Duke University whose broad research interests include experimental elementary particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Her main specific interests are in neutrino physics, and she studies neutrino oscillations with the Super-Kamiokande experiment. Dr. Scholberg received a BSc in Physics from McGill University in 1989 and a PhD from Caltech in 1997. She was a research associate at Boston University and an assistant professor at MIT before moving to Duke University in 2004.
**Ward Howard is an astronomy PhD candidate at UNC Chapel Hill working with the Evryscope under the supervision of Dr. Nicholas Law. He studies stellar activity and the effects of space weather on rocky planet atmospheres, using data from the gigapixel-scale Evryscope, which has continuously monitored the entire Southern sky since 2015. He received a BS in physics and mathematics from Union University in 2015.
Our FREE Astronomy on Tap events feature accessible, engaging science presentations on topics ranging from planets to black holes to the beginning of the Universe. There is always lots of time to ask questions and interact with the presenters and other scientists who inevitably stick around for the beer.
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