Garik Israelian: What’s inside a star? Garik Israelian began his lecture describing spectroscopy which is the study of the interaction between matter and radiated energy. This measurement of radiation intensity as a function of wavelength and are often used to describe experimental spectroscopic methods. Garik went into describe spectrographs, more concentrating on one particular spectrograph, HARPS. A spectrograph is an instrument that separates light into a frequency spectrum and records the signal using a camera. The HARPS spectrograph stands for a high accuracy radial velocity planet searcher and was installed in 2002 in Chile. Since its installation, it has discovered over 130 planets. Garik continued on to describe his research on different stars and planets, talking about an interesting element known as, Osmium. Its interesting trait is that it is only found in supernovae. Mr. Israelian also talked about a Super flare. A super flare is a flare that is thousands of millions times more powerful than the sun. The existence of these super flares is still one of the mysteries in astronomy and he mentioned there are 6 or 7 instances with them.
Astroseismology is the science that studies the internal structure of pulsating stars by the interpretation of their frequency spectra. This is used to detect sound waves in sun like stars, which is turn, is used to research extraterrestrial life. Tectonic and volcanic activity is very important in the research of extraterrestrial life; for they allow researchers to seek the activity and creation of methane, oxygen and carbon dioxide. Lastly, he predicted within 15 years that we will discover life in another planet and about 5 years we will be able to locate and discover earth like planets that revolve around sun like stars.

Andrea Ghez: The hunt for a super massive black hole Andrea Ghez’s passion is the research to see if there truly is a super massive black hole at the center of galaxies; more