UVAC Monthly Meeting

Name: UVAC Monthly Meeting
Start: 2024-10-10T19:00:00-06:00
Location: Utah Valley University

Schedule

Thu Oct 10 2024 at 07:00 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

Utah Valley University | Orem, UT

Please join us on Thursday, October 10 for our monthly UVAC meeting. Our featured speaker for October is Dr. Benjamin Coughenour, Assistant Professor of Physics at UVU. His topic will be "X-Ray Studies of White Dwarfs":
"When our Sun runs out of fuel some 5-6 billion years from now, it will swell up and cast off its outer layers, and only its collapsed core will remain. This, rather than a violent supernova, is the fate of most stars. Known as white dwarfs, the leftover cores are small but incredibly hot and dense. So dense, in fact, that they rely on quantum mechanics to prevent them from collapsing under their own gravity! The unique physics of a white dwarf provides a theoretical mass limit, and no white dwarf can weigh more than roughly 1.4 times the mass of our Sun. While most are nowhere near that heavy, by searching the sky in X-rays we are finding some of the most massive white dwarfs known. In doing so, we hope to learn not just about white dwarfs themselves, but about our expanding universe as well."
Thursday, 10 October, 7pm, UVU Planetarium, Pope Science Building. Parking in all student lots is free after 5pm.