Astronomy on Tap – Aspen, CO – Cosmic Feedback: When Black Holes Talk Back (Special Fly-by Event)!

Join us for a special fly-by AoT event in Aspen, CO! Mi Chola, Monday, Feb. 3rd – 7:30-9:30 PM Mountain Time!

No reservations are necessary—just show up and stay for as long as you want. Food and beverages are available for purchase. All ages welcome! See Mi Chola’s menu on their website. There will be trivia and bingo and prizes (many black hole themed!) to be won, along with some fancy Aspen Center for Physics Swag! And it’s completely free!

You’ll hear from visiting Black Hole Whisperer, Dr. Vivian U! She’ll be telling us about Cosmic Feedback: When Black Holes Talk Back! Vivian is an observational astronomer at the University of California, Irvine. She received her bachelor’s degree in Astrophysics from Caltech and PhD in Astronomy from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is currently a co-chair of the Habitable Worlds Observatory AGN Working Group and of the NASA Cosmic Origins AGN Science Interest Group Leadership Council. Vivian was a recipient of the 2020 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, and was named a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow in 2019. She was featured on PBS NOVA in the Episode “New Eye on the Universe”, and was a speaker at the 2024 TEDxManhattanBeach event.

AoT Aspen will be hosted by AoT Tucson, Baltimore and Champaign-Urbana alum, Gautham Narayan. Gautham is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He works on wide-field surveys – telescopes that cover vast swaths of the sky each night. He uses these maps of the sky to study the dynamics and composition of the Universe, particularly with stars that blow up – supernovae! His group does cutting edge work to adapt artificial intelligence techniques to astrophysics, to find rare and unusual supernovae, understand their physics and the nature of the galaxies they blow up in, and builds the core tools to enable the astrophysics community to work together, connecting different experiments across the electromagnetic and gravitational wave spectrum.

We’ll see you there! Unless you fall into a black hole’s event horizon!