Live from Chile: The Greatest Cosmic Movie Ever Made

media release: Please join UW Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program. The events are free and open to the public.

Room 206 Ingraham Hall - 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706.  ZOOM REGISTRATION

About the presentation: Located on a mountaintop in Chile, the nearly-complete Vera C. Rubin Observatory will revolutionize the way we explore the cosmos. Using the largest camera ever built, Rubin will repeatedly scan the sky for 10 years and create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our Universe. The resulting movie will bring the night sky to life, revealing asteroids and comets, pulsating stars, and supernova explosions. The data will advance our understanding of the universe, allow us to explore the mysteries of invisible dark matter and dark energy, and help to address questions we have yet to imagine. Rubin Observatory is the product of decades of scientific visioning, technological development, project planning, and construction by an international team of thousands of people, including essential partnership and contributions from the Chilean astronomical community. This presentation will feature a selection of first images from Rubin Observatory, and provide a behind-the-scenes look at the process and the teamwork needed to bring a major new scientific facility online.

About the presenter: Keith Bechtol is an associate professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an observational cosmologist who uses the universe as a laboratory to study the fundamental nature of matter, energy, space and time. Professor Bechtol made significant contributions to studies of high-energy gamma-ray and neutrino emission from galaxies throughout cosmic time, led the discovery of several of the most dark-matter-dominated galaxies known, and assembled a catalog of more than 500 million galaxies to advance our understanding of dark energy. He has a leadership role in commissioning the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is expected to catalog more stars, galaxies, supernovae and solar system objects during its first year of operation than all previous astronomical telescopes combined. Bechtol received a PhD in Physics from Stanford University and a Bachelors in Physics at the College of William & Mary