Profs & Pints: Cosmic Blasts

 presents:  a look at extreme events in our universe, with Alexander J. van der Horst, associate professor of astrophysics at George Washington University, teacher of a course on the origins of the cosmos, and researcher of gamma-ray bursts and other transient sources of emission in space. Profs and Pints DC“Cosmic Blasts,”

While most of the universe hums steadily along fairly unchanged over the course of human existence, there are exceptions out there, objects that experience outbursts and other dramatic variation in a year, a day, or even a fraction of a second. They include some of the most extreme phenomena in the universe, including black holes, neutron stars, and the big cosmic explosions that cause such objects to form.

Finding and observing these big cosmic explosions is a challenging task. However, we’ve been making dramatic progress with new space observatories such as the JWST, through networks of radio telescopes on several continents,…