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www-astro.ulb.ac.be/~siess
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| The Colors of Stars |
| Russell F. Pinizzotto, PhD |
| Thursday, Feb 12, 2009 at 8:00 PM |
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All stars are not white! They are a wide range of colors from deep ruby red to brilliant blue-white. These colors are not only beautiful, they give us clues to the stars’ sizes, ages and life cycle status. This talk will discuss the birth, life and death of stars.
Stellar lifecycles were brilliantly summarized in a single chart by Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell early in the Twentieth Century. The HR Diagram is one of the most important and intriguing graphs in all of science. It relates the color of a star to its brightness. Both change during a star’s life, so it is possible to track the life of a star as a path through the HR diagram. We observe stars at only single points in their lives, but we can see so many of them that we can develop excellent models of how they evolve. While stellar life is interesting, stellar death results in many of the objects that amateur astronomers love to observe including planetary nebulae, supernova remnants and black holes. Discovering a supernova can even make you famous! Finally, it is true that we humans are all made of stardust, the elements that are formed in stellar cores and supernova explosions. This talk we try to make sense of all of stellar history in less than hour.
Dr. Russell Pinizzotto is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Merrimack College in North Andover, MA. Since he joined Merrimack, the number of science and engineering majors has increased from 340 to 520. Russ is a Professor of Physics teaching astronomy and musical acoustics.
Prior to joining Merrimack in 2004, Russ was the founding Dean of the Missouri Academy of Science, Mathematics and Computing at Northwest Missouri State University. He previously was the founding chair of the graduate Department of Materials Science at the University of North Texas, where he was a professor of Physics and Materials Science for 13 years. His most interesting research used DNA as a template for building mesoscale electronic structures.
In 1983, Russ founded an electron microscopy service company in Dallas, TX - Ultrastructure, Inc. He was a senior member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments' Central Research Laboratories and spent a year as a post-doctoral scientist at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Before attending graduate school he worked as a scientist for Structural Composites Industries in Azusa, CA and as an undergraduate, he worked in the Physics Division of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA.
Russ received his Ph.D. in Materials Science from UCLA in 1978, an Engineer's Degree from UCLA in 1977, and a B.S. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1972. More recently, he just completed an M.S. in astronomy from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, to be awarded in March 2009.
Russ is married to Robin Winters Johnson, a management consultant and founder of Vidalia Associates. They have three children and one grandchild. His non academic interests include music (he plays drums and vibes in the Merrimack College Jazz Ensemble), astronomy, boating, golf, flying and go. He is a voracious reader of everything from history to science fiction.
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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