Previous Karl Kamper Memorial Lectures

November 4, 2011, Cody Hall, 2pm to 3pm
Professor Paul Hickson
University of British Columbia

Seeing Clearly: How the New Technology of Adaptive Optics is Transforming Ground-Based Optical Astronomy

Technological advances in electro-optics, lasers and computing now make it possible for ground-based telescopes to reduce, and in some cases practically eliminate, the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere. This allows many ground-based telescopes to match or even surpass the resolution achieved by space facilities. Current 8 metre class telescopes achieve a 50-fold improvement, enabling new scientific breakthroughs ranging from direct imaging of extra-solar planets to probing the strong gravitational fields of supermassive black holes in galaxies.

The next generation of 20 - 40 meter telescopes will incorporate adaptive optics as an integral part of the facility. In fact, the technology is essential to achieve full scientific potential. The
milli-arcsecond resolution that adaptive optics provides will also increase the sensitivity of the telescopes by as much as four orders of magnitude. These gains will open up entirely new scientific frontiers that are now beginning to be charted. Canadian scientists and engineers are playing leading roles in this enterprise, both in designing and building adaptive optics systems, and in exploiting them scientifically.

My talk will explore the different types of astronomical adaptive optics systems and explain how they produce such dramatic improvements in telescope performance. I will illustrate this with some recent scientific results, and examples of work underway in Canada in connection with the Thirty Meter Telescope project.

November 19, 2010
Prof. John D. Monnier
University of Michigan

Imaging the Surfaces of Stars

Under the best conditions, telescope diffraction limits the angular resolution for astronomical imaging. Using interferometry, we can coherently combine light from widely-separated telescopes to overcome the single-telescope diffraction limit to boost our imaging resolution by orders of magnitude. I will review recent technical and scientific breakthroughs made possible by the Michigan Infrared Combiner of the CHARA Array on Mt. Wilson, CA, with baselines of 330 meters allowing near-infrared imaging with sub-milli-arcsecond resolution. I will highlight the first resolved images of main sequence stars besides the Sun, focusing on the oblate and gravity-darkened photospheres of rapidly rotating stars. We can now also resolve the interacting components of close binary stars for the first time and I will give an update on the remarkable on-going eclipse of epsilon Aurigae.

November 6, 2009

Dr.Paul T. P. Ho
Distinguished Research Fellow and Director of Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics

 Preparing for ALMA First Science

The Submillimeter Array has been in operations on Mauna Kea since 2004. Many interesting and important results have been obtained in that time including planetary studies, dusty circumstellar disks, extremely collimated molecular outflows, circumnuclear disks in nearby galaxies, magnetic fields via dust polarization studies, and dark submillimeter galaxies at high red shifts. These studies are paving the say for the first science projects to be attempted on ALMA, currently under construction in the Atacama Desert. I will show some of our latest results.

November 21, 2008

Prof. Adam Burrows
Princeton University 

 Theory for the Atmospheres and Radii of Extrasolar Giant Planets

Approximately 300 exoplanets, mostly giant planets in the Jovian mass range, but also more than 40 "Neptune-mass" planets, have been detected orbiting stars in the solar neighborhood. More than 50 of them are transiting their primaries and a large subset of these have collectively yielded a wealth of structural and physical information which theorists are attempting to interpret. A number of these giant planets have been detected directly by the Spitzer infrared space telescope. These constitute the first remote-sensing data of extrasolar worlds. I will summarize the embryonic theory of such irradiated giant planets and discuss what we have learned about their atmospheres and origin. We are witnessing the birth of a new astronomical discipline and I will describe some of its first notable findings.

Host: Dae-Sik Moon, Ray Jayawardhana & Marten van Kerkwijk

November 16, 2007

 Prof. Andy Gould
Ohio State University 

Inaugural Karl W. Kamper Memorial Lecture
Recent Developments in Gravitational Microlensing

Over the past 15 years, gravitational microlensing has radically diversified from a method narrowly focused on finding dark matter to a very general astronomical technique. Microlensing has now detected 7 planets, including several that are inaccessible by other search methods. It has resolved the surfaces of distant stars, served as a magnifying glass to take spectra of extremely faint objects, and revealed a number of surprising phenomena. I give a sweeping look at this remarkable technique, including its successes and future challenges.

Host: Peter Martin