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| The Search for Stellar Origins from Antiquity to the 21st Century |
| Dr. Charles Lada, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics |
| Thursday, Jan 10, 2008 at 8:00 PM |
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This month we welcome Dr. Charles Lada, Associate Director of the Radio and Geoastronomy Division at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, whose research work has centered on trying to unlock the secrets of star and planet formation in the Milky Way.
Most of what we know about the origins of stars and planets we have learned in the past quarter century, yet the question of stellar origins is among the oldest in astronomy. In this talk, "The Search for Stellar Origins from Antiquity to the 21st Century," Dr. Lada will explore the question of why it took so long for star formation to become an active branch of astronomical research. He will review ideas and concepts about the nature of stars and stellar origins from the ancient Greeks to Newton and then to William Herschel who in the eighteenth century proposed a surprisingly modern picture of star formation. Dr. Lada will discuss the "dark ages" of the nineteenth century when the infusion of new technology and physics set back research in this field for more than a century. He will also review the advances in physics and astronomy in the early twentieth century that set the stage for the renaissance in star formation research that began in mid to late twentieth century and continues unabated today.
Primarily an observational astronomer, Dr. Lada was initially trained as a radio astronomer, but later became a very active infrared astronomer. He has worked with both
ground-based and space-based telescopes. He was among the first scientists to discover and investigate giant molecular clouds and among the first to find and study molecular outflows and jets associated with star formation. Dr. Lada developed a classification scheme for young stellar objects and protostars that has been used by researchers in the field for the last 20 years to investigate these objects. More recently he had been working on understanding the origin and early evolution of star clusters, protoplanetary disks, and dense molecular cloud cores, the sites of star and planet formation. Dr. Lada has developed an interest in the history of astronomy and his lecture will relate some of the
fascinating and unexpected things he has learned about the development of humankind's thinking concerning stellar (and planetary) origins, from biblical times to the present.
Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner with our speaker at 5:45PM, Chang Sho Restaurant located at 1712 Massachusetts Avenue in our fair city, Cambridge, MA.
~Virginia Renehan
Please join us for a pre-meeting dinner discussion at Changsho, 1712 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA at 6:00pm before the meeting. |
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