May Meeting

We explore the extreme center of our Galaxy, a chaotic region containing dense gas, stars, and even a supermassive black hole.  The normal rules for star formation do not apply here, and understanding why will help us to understand star formation in galaxies throughout the universe.

Cara Battersby didn’t realize school was supposed to end and just keeps coming back. She received her PhD in astrophysics from the University of Colorado at Boulder, then held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and is now an assistant professor of physics at the University of Connecticut. She spends a lot of her time studying how stars are born in our Galaxy’s center, developing a new mission with NASA (in spaaaace!), and secretly wants to be Carl Sagan when she grows up. Cara believes equal access to education is the recipe for a better world.