May 10, 2019 8-10PM

Event Type: Lecture and Stargazing
Title: A Star is Born
Lecturer: Mike Grudic
Position: Graduate Student
Institution:Caltech
Abstract:
Stars are the building blocks of galaxies and home to the planets. We must understand how stars form to explain many other aspects of the Universe, yet many mysteries remain about this complex process. Starting from the Big Bang, I will walk us through the chain of events that we know had to happen to produce a star like our Sun in a galaxy like the Milky Way. Then, I will talk about the main things we don't know: why do the stars form in the quantity that they do? Why is the typical mass of a newborn star the same everywhere we have looked? And why is star formation so slow? I will show how observations and theory are working together to answer these fundamental questions about how a star is born.