Colloquium on Jul. 3, 2023

Making Movies of the Night Sky

Speaker:Lin Yan (Caltech)

Venue:SWIFAR Building 2111

Time:15:00 PM, Monday, Jul. 3, 2023

Abstract:

Beautiful night sky has billions of stars and the sprawling Milky Way. To our eyes, it seems calm and static. Today, movies of the night sky taken by astronomers using wide field cameras have revealed a totally different picture. Our night sky is full of catastrophic events, showing dramatic changes on time scales of seconds, hours, days, months and years. In this talk, I will describe such a movie-making survey, called Zwicky Transient Facility, which has discovered some amazing transient phenomena, including black hole swallowing stars, the birth of spinning neutron stars and mergers/collisions of stars/planets in binary systems.