Astronomy on Tap Chicago Presents:
ENTER THE SINGULARITY: BLACK HOLES AND BREW-TRON STARS
Prepare to have your mind spaghetti-fied at Marz Brewing on February 26th at 7PM with fun facts about the most extreme objects in the universe: black holes and neutron stars! We’ll have two short talks accompanied by trivia, and there will be a lot of great Marz brews to taste as you are sucked into a region of immense space-time curvature. Here are some quick previews of the talks and speakers:
Black holes are the most fascinating objects in the universe. They are surprisingly simple to describe but, despite this simplicity, there is still so much we don’t understand about them. In many ways they represent the frontier of our knowledge of physics and the universe. Gautam Satishchandran, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, will describe the few (surprising!) things that we do know about black holes and explain how they hold the key to unlocking the deepest questions about the universe.
Looking for the most extreme matter in the universe? The inside of a neutron star is a good place to start. These leftovers from massive stars exploding are about 500,000 times heavier than the Earth, but no larger in diameter than the city of Chicago. Their cores are so dense that we don’t really know what they’re made of: dark matter? strange quarks? nuclear pasta? Phil Landry, a postdoc at the University of Chicago and a member of the LIGO scientific collaboration, will discuss some of these proposals and explain how ripples in spacetime can tell us what’s going on inside neutron stars.