Astronomy on Tap Corvallis: Fast Radio Bursts-Signals from Across the Universe

Join us on Tuesday Feb. 11th at 7pm for a talk by Dr. James McKee from Union College!  His talk is titled:

Fast Radio Bursts: Signals from Across the Universe

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are bright flashes of radio waves that last only a few milliseconds and are visible across the universe. Although approximately 10,000 of these occur every day, they were only discovered by accident in 2007. Their origins remain largely unknown, making FRBs one of the hottest topics in radio astronomy. In this talk, I will describe the discovery of FRBs, what we know about them, and what the next few years of radio astronomy holds for this exciting new field of astronomy.

Dr. McKee’s bio:

I did my degree at the University of Hull and my PhD at the University of Manchester, where I worked at Jodrell Bank Observatory. I have worked in research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (where I was also the on-site pulsar astronomer at the Effelsberg telecope) and the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto (where I worked on the CHIME telescope). I am currently an assistant professor of physics at Union College in NY where I am in the process of establishing my pulsars and fast radio bursts research programme.