April 21, 2006

Colloquium Topic: New Eyes on the Universe: Observing Beyond Hubble with NASA’s Other Space Telescopes

For fifteen years, the world has been fascinated by glorious images taken with the Hubble Space telescope. But these visible images represent just a small portion of a larger picture. Much of the universe contains violent processes and dust-enshrouded objects that are revealed only by searching for their signatures in infrared, ultraviolet, x-ray and gamma-ray light. In particular, star birth, star death, black holes, cosmic collisions, and the origins of other solar systems are revealed in stark clarity. This talk will focus on new data from NASA's Chandra, Spitzer, GALEX, and Swift satellites and how these data are adding to our cumulative knowledge. This multi-wavelength approach offers the best hope to advance our understanding of modern mysteries such as black holes, dark matter and the evolution of the universe.

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Colloquium Speaker: Kim Weaver

Dr. Kim Weaver is an astrophysicist and Associate Director for Science of the Astrophysics Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. She began studying astronomy at the University of Maryland in 1987 and discovered the world of high-energy astrophysics as a graduate researcher at Goddard in 1988. After obtaining her Ph.D. from Maryland, she moved to Penn State University and then to Johns Hopkins University, where she is affiliated as an adjunct Associate Professor. In 1996, Dr. Weaver won a NASA Presidential Early Career Award to pursue research in extragalactic astronomy. She returned to Goddard two years later to work on the Constellation-X mission, part of NASA's Beyond Einstein program. In addition to serving as the Deputy Project Scientist for Constellation-X, she has been the Program Scientist for the Spitzer Space Telescope.