Speaker Night

Speaker: Dr Michelle Thaller, Goddard Space Center, NASA

Talk: Space’s Scariest Monsters: Neutron Stars and Black Holes

For a Halloween treat, come learn about the extremely scary afterlives of stars.  After the destruction of a supernova explosion, the leftovers can become either a neutron star or a black hole.  These monsters can bend space and send time curing in front of our eyes, and things that go bump in the dark can rip parts of the earth’s atmosphere off from thousands of light years away.  On a friendlier note, our bodies contain bits of stellar corpses from stars that died billions of years ago -we’d be dead without them!

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astrophysicist with over two decades of science communication experience. Her research involves the lifecycles of stars, and she has worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA Headquarters and the Goddard Space Flight Center, where she is currently the liaison between the Office of Communication and the Science Directorate. Outside her work at NASA, she has appeared in many television science programs, including How the Universe Works and Space’s Deepest Secrets.  Michelle has done two TEDx talks about astronomy and has hosted the podcast Orbital Path on public radio.

Here is the link to the ZOOM presentation.