Program Meeting - March 27, 2013

On March 27th, we are happy to welcome Bob Fosbury with his presentation "We are stardust! The origin of the chemical elements."

You may all fondly believe that you were conceived in a big bang. Your bodies, however, are built from raw materials that emerged from "the" Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. This primordial gas consisted mostly of hydrogen and helium and so a great deal of cosmic history had to unfold before the rich mix of chemical elements became available to make you into the charming, beautiful people you are.

This is the story of how these basic chemical building blocks were constructed during those 13.7 billion years. It is a tale of gravity, of stellar birth and death and of a gradual synthesis of the elements as we see them around us today. It is a wonderful story and actually dreadfully complicated. But I'll use lots of great pictures and try to tell it in a way that will excite you as much as it does me! Using our telescopes as time machines, we can see many parts of the process being acted out in front of our eyes.

Bob recently hosted a Hubble talk which can be seen at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT9RTIzNUPM