Profs & Pints Napa: The Universe as Never Seen Before

Profs and Pints Napa presents: “The Universe as Never Seen Before,” on the fantastic discoveries being made through space instruments that measure high-energy light, with Lynn Cominsky, award-winning emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at Sonoma State University and veteran researcher with NASA’s high-energy astrophysics missions.

[Tickets available only online, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/-napa-universe .]

A lot of attention is being given to the strikingly beautiful images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope. But their views of infrared light and the visible sky offer only part of the big picture, tame in comparison with what we can see using instruments that measure high-energy forms of light such as X rays and gamma rays.

Come to the August 25th debut of Profs and Pints at Napa Yard to learn about the latest discoveries being made by NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics missions and gain perspective on the Universe as place where supermassive black holes tear apart stars in distant galaxies, jets of particles stream out of smaller black holes in our own, and supernovae explode with the light of a billion suns.

Your guide on this tour of the drama-filled “invisible universe,” Lynn Cominsky, has spent more than 25 years as a scientific co-investigator with NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory missions and is a passionate advocate of science education.

Her exploration of the high-energy universe will focus on three major sources of cosmic gamma rays: black holes, Fermi Bubbles, and pulsars.

You’ll learn how the black holes that lurk in the cores of distant galaxies and right here in our own Milky Way remain one of nature’s most enigmatic objects. Astrophysicists have been gaining a better understanding of them, however, as the Fermi telescope, the Swift observatory, and other instruments have worked in tandem to study massive cosmic events such as collisions of black holes and neutron stars.

We’ll look at the mystery surrounding the origins of Fermi Bubbles—huge blobs of gamma radiation that extend north and south out of the center of our galaxy. You’ll be introduced to pulsars, the smaller cousins of stellar black holes, which have magnetic fields up to a billion billion times that of Earth, can squeeze up to 1.5 times the mass of the sun into an object the size of San Francisco, and light up Earth’s ionosphere with the energy they release when their crusts crack from magnetic stress.
Albert Einstein will enter into the discussion as we look at how his famous E=mc2 equation fits into the discussion. To round out the talk, Professor Cominsky will talk about the prospects for future breakthroughs in our understanding of black holes and pulsars, what black holes have to do with the fate of the Universe, and some of the mysteries that remain to be explored by future missions. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30.)

Image: Light visible only via X-ray shows up as blue in this composite image of the Crab Nebula and surrounding pulsar winds. (Image from NASA/HST/ASU/J. Hester et al. /Public domain.)