Meetings are FREE and open to the public, and are held at Chapman University Agenda: Club Announcements Whats Up: See Announcement on Home Page. Main speaker: See announcement on Home Page break Library: Members can check out books from our extensive collection. Refreshments: will be available (coffee, donuts, soft drinks, etc.). About OCA General Meetings […]
Exoplanets: Finding Life in the Galaxy Join Dr. Zellem, a planetary astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as he discusses how scientists find and characterize exoplanets, planets outside of our Solar System, with the ultimate goal of finding extraterrestrial life. Robert Zellem
From the big bang to the empty end - the universe from the point of view of modern cosmology The scientific view point on our Universe has gone through a major transformation in the last decades. In my talk, I will talk about the knows but also the major unknowns we have. My main focus […]
Investigating the Mysteries of Exploding Stars Hubble Space Telescope image of supernova 1994D in galaxy NGC 4526. Supernovae are cosmic explosions where a single star can suddenly become as bright as a billion stars combined. Even though supernovae are crucial to the Universe in many ways, such as impacting the evolution of galaxies and producing […]
News from the Universe The Virgo and two LIGO Gravitational Wave observatories are in observation mode. They detect more than one inspiral event per week, of Black Holes and Neutron Stars, and started making a strange picture of the collapsed-matter Universe. Why are there so many heavy Black Holes out there? How did they form […]
The Universe in Infrared Light (There is no Red in Infrared) The infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum plays an indispensable role in both terrestrial and astronomical applications. On Earth, IR light runs our remote controls, provides security and surveillance, and identifies disease. In space, infrared light allows us to explore planet surface features, quantify […]
OUR LITTLE CORNER OF THE GALAXY – THE EARTHLIGHT EXPRESS In The Earthlight Express, internationally published science artist Chris Butler brings his popular Our Little Corner of the Galaxy tours of the universe close to home – with an excursion across the wild and majestic wastelands of Earth's moon. Join Chris for a unique […]
Astro-cinematography from the Mount Laguna Observatory The stars and galaxies that fill the night sky appear roughly today as they have throughout human history. However, close inspection shows that these objects change, sometimes dramatically, over decades or months, or occasionally over just minutes. The field of time-domain astronomy has arisen in recent years thanks to […]
Music of the Spheres: Gravitational Waves from Black Holes The Nobel prize in 2016 was awarded for the detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO interferometer. So faint are these ripples that the only events powerful enough to produce detectable signals are the collisions of black holes and neutron stars, some forty times the mass […]
From Apples to Orange Juice: Can We Infer a Galaxy's Biography from Just One Photograph? Despite having data stretching back over 10 billion years and computer simulations that make realistic-looking galaxies starting from just gas and dark matter, humans do not have a theory that predicts why a galaxy looks the way it does based […]