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| Type Ia Supernova Progenitors |
| Dr. Stella Kafka |
| Thursday, Dec 10, 2015 at 8:00 PM |
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| Type I Supernovae are massive stellar explosions that result from an interaction between a white dwarf and a companion whose mass it accrues in a close binary system. When the white dwarf’s mass reaches 1.4 that of the sun, the supernova occurs. Dr. Kafka has been at the forefront of studies as to the kind of binary systems that produce Type Ia supernovae.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Kafka is the current Director of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, having been selected to the position in February of this year. When she published her first astronomical research paper 15 years ago, then-Director Janet Mattei was one of her co-authors.
After obtaining her Bachelor’s of Science degree at the University of Athens, in Greece, Dr. Kafka moved to Indiana University, where she earned a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Astronomy, with a double minor in Physics and Geophysical Sciences. There she received the Hollis and Grete Johnson Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Research. After completing her Ph.D., she held a series of prestigious postdoctoral positions and fellowships, first at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (CTIO, where she received the National Optical Astronomy Observatory Excellence Award), then at Caltech, and finally as a NASA Astrobiology Institute Fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. She has extensive experience gathering, reducing, and analyzing photometric and spectroscopic data; has helped commission two different instruments at the WIYN Observatory in Arizona; and written a data-reduction manual along with more than 40 refereed papers. As a member of the “Stellar Populations” working group for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST, the large professional facility that will image the whole sky every few nights starting around 2020), she contributed to the LSST science book.
In addition to serving as the Director of two research and mentorship programs for undergraduates while in Chile, for the past three years Dr. Kafka has been managing editorial, marketing, financial, business development, operations, and production aspects of journals at the American Institute of Physics (AIP). As a journal manager at AIP, Stella successfully oversaw the launch of a new journal and served as a liaison between publishing and research communities.
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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