The next ORION program will take place at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 15, at the City Room (Room A-111), McNally-Coffey Building, Roane State Community College, Oak Ridge campus on Briarcliff Avenue. The title of the program is “How to Explode a Star,” and the speaker will be professor Sherwood Richers, from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The program is free and open to the public. A live Zoom session will also be available.
An abstract of the program follows, according to an ORION news release.
Turbulent behavior of quantum neutrino flavor inside of a core-collapse supernova.
“You don’t need a star destroyer – a big enough star will explode all on its own. Although quite rarely visible with the naked eye, detectable astrophysical explosions occur on a daily basis. In addition to being fun to watch, we think these explosions could hold the secrets to some age-old questions if only we knew how to look inside and see what was happening. Questions like: Where did we come from? How is it that the universe made just the right conditions to form just the right amount of heavy elements to make planets and people? Can we blow up the sun? I will talk about how we can find and follow these explosions, what current models say about how the extreme conditions inside of these events drive the actual explosion, and how we think that careful observation and modeling could yield insights into our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature.”
Richers studied at the University of Virginia and got his Ph.D. at Caltech. He did research at North Carolina State University and the University of California Berkeley before joining the UT faculty in 2023, where he is currently teaching courses in undergraduate astronomy and general relativity. His research is focused on the quantum mechanical processes that drive changes in neutrino flavor in explosive astrophysical environments. However, other research interests include quantum computing, machine learning, and gravitational waves.
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: UT professor to speak on ‘How to Explode a Star’ at Oak Ridge meeting