Astronomy Instrumentation and Detectors

Description: Astronomers rely on scientific instruments to get good quality data to explore the unresolved questions about our universe. One way to get better data is to improve our scientific instrumentation. This is what makes new instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope so exciting. I will discuss some of the technological advancements in some popular science instruments and also talk about my research on next generation X-ray detectors.

Bio: My name is Miriam Marino (she/her) and I am a third year PhD student at UW-Madison in the Astronomy department. I work in Professor Dan McCammon’s research group and my research focus on fabrication next generation high energy resolution X-ray detectors for space based applications...

Bending Under Pressure: What Lies Beyond a Galaxy

Cosmology tells us that roughly only 5% of matter in the universe is made up of normal atoms and matter that we’re familiar with. However, when astronomers try to take account of the matter they can see inside of galaxies, they find something puzzling – some of it is missing! So, where could it possibly be? It turns out there’s a good chance that it’s not inside of galaxies at all, but completely outside of them in a hard-to-observe gaseous state. When there are thousands of galaxies clustered together, this gaseous medium gets hot enough for us to see it at X-ray wavelengths, but in smaller groups of galaxies (typically 10s of galaxies), it is still difficult to observe and account for...