Stellar Couples! (Astronomy on Tap, Leiden, online, English)
The next online Astronomy on Tap will take place on Monday 22 February, 20:00 pm and will be streamed live on the AoT-Leiden YouTube channel. Jakub Klencki and Nadia Blagorodnova (both from Radboud University Nijmegen) will tell us all about binary stars and gravitational waves. So grab a drink, get comfortable, and join the discussion for an evening of informal astronomy, fun games, and a chance to win cool prizes. All ages and backgrounds are welcome.
Read more about the speakers and their talks below the embeded YouTube-frame of the event.
Jakub Klencki: "The Universe is loud in gravitational waves"
Jakub is a graduate student at Radboud University. He is interested in lives of the most massive and luminous stars, their deaths in bright supernovae explosions, and their mysterious afterlives as neutron stars and black holes. In particular, he uses computational simulations to study the evolution of stars living in close pairs, in which they strongly interact with each other. In this talk, he will present how the birth of gravitational-wave astronomy has opened the long awaited unique window into the world of massive stars and their remnants. He will explain how detections of gravitational-wave signals from merging black holes and neutron stars can be used to probe even the very distant, early Universe.
Nadia Blagorodnova: "Stellar couples: a final dance"
Nadia Blagorodnova is a research fellow at Radboud University. She uses observations to study explosive phenomena that light the ever changing night sky. In particular, she focuses on astrophysical transients caused by the mergers of stars, which help scientists to understand how stars evolve when they have a companion. In this talk, she will explain the last 'dance' that a stellar couple perform before merging with each other, and show observations of stellar mergers in our own Galaxy.