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What the Heck is Gravity?
Dr. Ed Fomalont (NRAO)
Next CAS Meeting
Wednesday, April 6 at 7 pm
At Leander McCormick Observatory -
Abstract:
Gravity, the force that "keeps" people on the ground, has intrigued many societies over the millennia. In the late 1600's, Isaac Newton formulated a mathematical equation for the gravitational force between all pairs of objects and their response to this force. This equation predicted the motion of all objects on or near the Earth, and the orbits of the planets. Over the past hundred years, astronomers and physicists have extended their research to phenomena beyond the Earth and the solar system. The 'understanding' of these phenomena is based on our present knowledge of the four known forces of nature: Electromagnetic, Strong, Weak, and Gravitational. The topics covered in the talk are: How small fluctuations in the hot expanding plasma from the big bang condensed into the earliest galaxies; the extreme bending of light from galaxies that are behind other galaxies; the possible cause of the unexpectedly fast rotation of the
stars in nearby galaxies; the decaying orbits between massive coalescing objects that produce gravity waves; and scenarios about the fate of the universe trillions of years in the future. -
CV:
BSc in Electrical Energy at the Univ of Pennsylvania (1957-1961), PhD in Astronomy and Physics at Caltech Pasadena CA (1961-1967). Main focus of research: Position, structure and polarization of radio sources; Radio tests of relativity; Imaging the motion of the x-ray/radio binary source ScoX-1; Software development and testing of radio interferometric data analysis. Over 400 scientific papers published. Post-doc position: University of Leiden (1969). Sabbaticals at Nobeyama Observatory in Japan (1973), the Very Large Array in New Mexico (1976-80), the Japanese Aeronautics Exploratory Agency (JAXA) in Tokyo (1994), and the ALMA array in Chile (2010-20). Senior scientist at NRAO from 1970 until retirement in May 2025.
