May 4, 2009

Las Cumbres Observatory Lecture: Taking the Universe's Baby Picture

George Foulsham

David Spergel, one of the nation's leading astrophysicists, will be this year's featured speaker in the Las Cumbres Observatory Lecture Series. Spergel will speak on "Taking the Universe's Baby Picture" on Thursday, May 14, at 7:30 p.m. at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 2559 Puesta del Sol Road, Santa Barbara.

The lecture, co-sponsored by UC Santa Barbara's Physics Department, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, is open to the public. Tickets are $8 for students and museum members, $10 for non-members.

Spergel's talk will focus on results from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and from other cosmological experiments in an attempt to answer the following questions:

· How old is the universe?

· What is its size and shape?

· What is the composition of the universe?

· How do galaxies emerge?

Spergel is the Charles Young Professor of Astronomy and Chair of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1982 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1985. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1987 and has held visiting faculty positions at the University of Maryland and the Institute for Advanced Study. Spergel is a MacArthur fellow and has been awarded the Sloan Fellowship and the Presidential Young Investigator award. Time magazine named Spergel one of America's top scientists in 2001.

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