Black Holes and the Technology to Find Them

On Wednesday, March 13, 2024 at 7 pm (PST), Dr. Jessica Lu (U. of California, Berkeley) will give a free, illustrated, non-technical lecture entitled:   

"Black Holes and the Technology to Find Them" in the Smithwick Theater at Foothill College, in Los Altos (see directions below)  

The talk is part of the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series, now in its 24th year.  

The population of black holes, objects left over from dead stars, in the Milky Way is almost entirely unexplored. Only about two dozen black holes are confidently known in our Galaxy -- all in “binary systems” where they orbit a living star. As a result, some of the most basic properties of black holes remain unknown, including the true number of black holes in the Galaxy, their masses and sizes, the fraction that is in binary systems, and how these black holes were formed. To understand these properties, we need to find and study a larger population of black holes, both in isolation and in binary systems. Gravitational lensing, something predicted by Einstein’s work, is opening a new window onto black holes, and the first free-floating black holes are now being discovered.  Astronomers expect that the number of known black holes will increase by a factor of 100 over the next decade.

Jessica Lu received her undergraduate degree in physics from MIT. She worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley for 3 years before returning to academia to pursue her Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics at UCLA. She was awarded a Millikan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Observational Astronomy at Caltech and was also an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) at the University of Hawaii, eventually joining the IfA faculty. In 2016, Lu joined the faculty of the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department, where she is currently an Associate Professor.

Foothill College is just off the El Monte Road exit from Freeway 280 in Los Altos.    

For directions and parking information, see: https://foothill.edu/parking/  
For a campus map, to find the Smithwick Theater (Bldg. 1000), see: 

https://foothill.edu/map/   

The lecture is co-sponsored by:  

• The Foothill College Science, Tech, Engineering & Math Division  
• The SETI Institute and
• The Astronomical Society of the Pacific 

 Past lectures in the series can also be found on YouTube at: http://youtube.com/svastronomylectures   
and as audio podcasts at: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1805595