Amateur Astronomy Under The Big Sky
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  • eXtreme Gravity – lecture

    Posted on March 2nd, 2017 Lynn Powers No comments

    MSU professor and astrophysicist Neil Cornish will present Cornish“Extreme Gravity,” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 7, at the Museum of the Rockies’ Hager Auditorium. A reception will follow.

    There are places in our Universe where gravity is so strong that it blurs the separation between space and time, and transforms matter into strange new forms. This the realm of extreme gravity. Gravity eventually causes stars to collapse, sometimes forming diamonds the size of the moon, other times forming mountain sized orbs of nuclear matter. The fate of the largest stars is even stranger, as gravity crashes matter out of existence to form a black hole – a region of space from which not even light can escape. Today we are able to explore the realm of extreme gravity for the first time using a new generation of telescope, one the size of the Earth, one that will soon be attached to the International Space station, and another that listens to the vibrations of gravity itself.

     

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