NASA Researcher Will Discuss What Certain Pulsars Reveal about Galactic Ecology Friday

Craig Markwardt of the Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center will speak on “Caught in the Act:What Accreting Millisecond Pulsars Tell Us about Galactic Ecology” noon Friday in Gagnon Lecture Hall, Hugel Science Center room 100.

The lecture is sponsored by the Physics Club, which will provide free pizza and drinks.

The talk description: “Stars and star systems can undergo significant change after they die. Massive stars in binary systems often form neutron stars, which in turn can accrete from their binary companions. It has long been expected that mass accretion would spin up neutron stars to very high spin rate pulsars, but until recently it has not been possible to detect that spin. Through careful monitoring, four new millisecond accreting pulsars have been detected, which confirm this theory and point to the way that isolated radio millisecond pulsars are formed.”

A pulsar is any of several celestial radio sources emitting short, intense bursts of radio waves, x-rays, or visible electromagnetic radiation at regular intervals, generally believed to be rotating neutron stars.

Markwardt earned a Ph.D. in physics from University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1997 and a B.S. with honors from Stanford University in 1992.

Previous Physics Club talks in 2003-04:

• Kim Coble, National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago and an instructor at Adler Planetarium: “Mapping the Universe from Antarctica”
• Brett Fadem, faculty fellow in physics at Colby College: “Nuclear Matter under Extreme Conditions”
• David Helfand, chair of the department of astronomy and astrophysics at Columbia University: “The Universal Timekeeper” and “The Cooling of Neutron Stars”
• New York University physicist Alan Sokal: “Are the Science Wars Over?”
• Suzanne Amador Kane, associate professor and chair of physics and astronomy at Haverford College: “Good Things in Small Packages: Biologically-inspired Nanostructures”
• Michael Shara, curator at the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Astrophysics: “Relativity for the Millions: Einstein”
• Elliott Horch, assistant professor of physics at University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth: “New Opportunities for Astrophysics with Binary Stars”
• Physics majors Cavan Stone ’05 (Shirley, Mass.) and Ibrahima Bah ’06 (Bronx, N.Y), and electrical and computer engineering major Simon Mushi ’06 (Gaborone, Botswana): Researchpalooza