Science at Cal: The Renaissance of Astrophysics

In this talk, Dr. Raffaella Margutti, Professor in the Departments of Astronomy and Physics, will share how new capabilities to study the night sky have led to recent discoveries and new ways to think about the universe around us. Astronomical transients are events that appear and disappear in the sky and are signs of catastrophic events in space, including the most extreme stellar (star) deaths and interactions between stars and supermassive black holes. Thanks to new and improved observational facilities, which use measurements of gravitational waves and light, we can now sample the night sky for astronomical transients with unprecedented resolution across the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond. This effort has led to the discovery of new types of stellar explosions, revolutionized our understanding of phenomena that we thought we already knew, and enabled the first insights into the physics of how black holes and stars interact.