Event Information
Black Holes, Exploding Stars and Clusters of Galaxies: 25 Years With Chandra, NASA's Flagship-Class X-Ray Observatory
Dr. Scott Randall
When: Nov. 14 at Noon
Where: The Jim and Linda Lee Planetarium
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is one of four missions that make up NASA's Great Observatories program, along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope. Twenty-five years after its launch, Chandra remains the highest angular resolution X-ray observatory ever constructed, by more than a factor of 10. This resolution, combined with a relatively large effective area and a predictable instrumental background, have allowed significant advancements in essentially all areas of modern astrophysics, including the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies, black hole accretion, supernovae and their progenitors, the interiors of neutron stars, the evolution of massive stars, the interaction of exoplanets and their stars, the physics of galaxy clusters, the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and cosmology. I will review some of the key science highlights made possible by Chandra, with a particular focus on what Chandra has helped us learn about AGN feedback, galaxy clusters and the nature of dark matter. I will also briefly discuss the outlook for X-ray astronomy over the coming decade and beyond.
Dr. Scott Randall is a Senior Astrophysicist and the head of the Chandra Science Operations Team in Mission Planning in the Chandra X-ray Center at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA). He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Virginia in 2005, before immediately doing a postdoc at the CfA and then transitioning to the Chandra Mission Planning Team in 2007. Dr. Randall's work focuses on using X-ray observations of clusters of galaxies to study such topics as the microphysics of the intracluster medium (ICM) plasma, how galaxy clusters interface with the large-scale cosmic web, the interplay between supermassive black holes and their surroundings, and the nature of dark matter.