Event
Crystal Coast Star Party 2023: NASA Scientist Dominic Benford presentation on the beginning of the Universe
Fee:
Free.Location:
Event will take place in the Harkers Island Visitors Center AuditoriumDates & Times
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Type of Event
Description
Join us at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center for a presenation by NASA Scientist Dominic Benford on the beginning of our universe. People have been gazing into the night for all of history and before. To us, the universe is mostly dark and static. Over eons, though, it has been changing in ways both large and small. Large, in that the cosmic web of galaxy clusters has been coalescing and collapsing to leave voids a hundred million light years across. Small, in that individual planets have been forming by the billions in solar systems throughout our galaxy. When I was born, we didn’t know these things. During my lifetime, I expect we will understand not just the past, but the future of our universe, and whether the conditions for life exist elsewhere out there. We have only to gaze into the night sky a little more.
Dominic joined NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland in 2001. He has been at NASA Headquarters in the Astrophysics Division since 2013, where he is the Program Scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the top priority mission recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences in 2010. The mission will conduct major surveys in the near-infrared to answer fundamental questions on the nature of dark energy, the distribution of dark matter, the occurrence of planets around other stars, and will enable the direct imaging of exoplanetary systems.
Dominic's astronomical research interests are in extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology, with an emphasis on the formation and evolution of galaxies and their stars. His sincere wish is that the vast wealth of data from the Roman Space Telescope will inspire astronomers everywhere, professional and amateur alike, to study the heavens in ways never before possible.