The Arts|Science Initiative will host a free lecture and discussion on why images of the universe—spacescapes— are so beautiful, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 5 in the Performance Hall of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.
The guest speaker will be Michael S. Turner, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist who coined the term ‘dark energy.’
[view:story=block_2=166844]
Through artful visualizations, with images produced by the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes, the audience will travel through space and time with Turner to explore the age of the universe, black holes in galaxies, the birth of stars, and most significantly the mystery of dark energy, whose repulsive gravity is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
Turner, the Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics and director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, has helped establish the interdisciplinary field that combines cosmology and elementary particle physics to understand the origin and evolution of the universe.
His research focuses on the earliest moments of creation, and he has made contributions to inflationary cosmology, particle dark matter and structure formation, the theory of big bang nucleosynthesis and the nature of dark energy.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
