Dr Stevance will take you into space
Horowhenua Astronomical Society is hosting Dr Heloise Stevance on Wednesday, February 9 from 7.30pm at Te Takeretanga O Kura-haupo¯.
Dr Stevance is an astrophysicist interested in supernovae and gravitational counterparts. She’s from the Paris region in France and studied in England.
She is also a coder and gamer and plays roller derby. She is a research fellow at Auckland University’s Faculty of Science and calls herself a computational astronomer.
She will be speaking about the deadly dance: when back holes and neutron star collide.
Gravitational waves are probably the most important discovery of modern astronomy and it has opened a whole new field of study. The observation of the merger of a 35 solar mass with a 30 solar mass black hole in the event GW150914 was not only historic, it was puzzling: how do you even make such a system?
In order to understand where gravitational wave progenitors come from and their initial properties, we need to use population synthesis codes, and binarity is a crucial ingredient to take into account.
Core collapse supernovae are the explosions resulting
from the death of (most) stars born with a mass > 8 solar masses. One of the ways we can help constrain their explosion models is through a better understanding of their explosion geometry. Since supernovae are unresolved at early days, however, this is not possible through direct imaging.
Using spectropolarimetry, we are able to deduce information about the global shape of the ejecta, as well as smaller scale, element specific, asymmetries. Entry only to those with vaccine passes and mask wearing is required by anyone attending this free event.