ODYSSEUS

Frederick M. Walter, Professor of Astronomy at Stony Brook University

Please join us at 1:30pm for our December General Meeting. This month’s guest speaker is Frederick M. Walter, Professor of Astronomy at Stony Brook University. Professor Walter. His presentation, ODYSSEUS, begins approximately 3pm.

ODYSSEUS is a coordinated campaign to study accretion onto low mass pre-main sequence stars. It is an adjunct to a larger Hubble Space Telescope Legacy program, ULLYSSES (the acronyms will be defined in my presentation). Following a discussion of how low mass (solar-like) stars form, I will describe this ongoing campaign which is designed to give insights into the final stages of how stars build up to their final masses. I will concentrate on the optical photometry and spectroscopy, and tell you how you can contribute to the campaign (which will run through about January 7 2023). 

Fred Walter has been a professor of Astronomy at Stony Brook University since 1989. He matriculated at MIT in course VIII (physics); earned a PhD in Astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley. and enjoyed 8 years in Boulder Colorado as a research scientist before moving to Long Island. He is primarily a spectroscopist with interests in stellar magnetic activity, the formation of stars and planets, the galactic novae, and neutron stars (i.e., star birth, stellar weather, and star death). He teaches courses in Astronomy, Science Fiction, and Doom and Gloom in the Anthropocene. In his spare time he bicycles, runs, brews (and drinks) beer, flies airplanes, writes proposals, and analyzes data.