Physics and Astronomy Lecture: Illuminating the Extreme Cosmos through Astroparticle

On Apr 23, 2022

Southwestern Oregon Community College’s Physics and Astronomy Lecture Series welcomes Tonia Venters with her lecture “Illuminating the Extreme Cosmos through Antiparticle Astronomy.” This will be a virtual lecture to provide insight into antiparticle astronomy. The lecture will be at 5:30 p.m. Monday, April 25, and will be streamed live at https://livestream.com/swocc/physicsandastronomy2021-22.

Venters is a research astrophysicist at NASA Goddard following academic studies at Rice University and the University of Chicago. Venters shares this description of her talk:

“For ages, astronomy has relied on light in order to learn about the universe, but light isn’t the only cosmic messenger. Recent developments have brought about the dawn of an exciting new era of multi-messenger astronomy, a discipline that combines observations in gravitational waves and astroparticles, as well as light, to get a more complete picture of the universe and the astrophysical systems within it. Of the different messengers, perhaps the most mysterious are two of the astroparticles: cosmic rays and neutrinos. Cosmic rays are the messengers of the most extreme accelerators in the cosmos; however, efforts to identify their origins have been thwarted for over a century due the fact that they don’t point back to their sources.

“On the other hand, even though neutrinos do point back to their sources, individual sources have yet to be confidently identified. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the recent developments in multi-messenger astronomy and then focus on the particular challenges of cosmic-ray and neutrino astronomy. Finally, I will set the stage for next generation facilities that will shed light on the universe through astroparticle astronomy.”

For information about this lecture and future events, contact Aaron Coyner, associate professor of physics, at 541-888-7244 or [email protected].