Extra Credit Presentation!

"Wrinkles in (space)Time - A Multi-messenger View of Our Universe"

By Dr. Nicole Lloyd-Ronning

During my visit, we'll discuss what the popular buzzword "multi-messenger astronomy" means and how this has opened up new ways of observing and understanding our universe.  We'll talk about multi-messenger astronomy particularly in the context of black holes and neutron stars and how observing these new "messengers" of our universe has allowed us to begin to understand the origin of life itself.  

Presenter Bio:

Nicole Lloyd-Ronning is an astrophysicist in the Computational Physics and Methods group (CCS-2) at Los Alamos National Lab, and teaches physics and astronomy at the University of New Mexico, Los Alamos.  She models the multi-scale physics behind the bright, explosive deaths of very massive stars, the black holes they create, and uses these explosions as tools to learn about star formation and their evolution in our universe.  She is the author of Great Mysteries in Astrophysics: A Guide to What We Don’t Know, a book about the most pressing unsolved puzzles in our universe. She received her B.A. in physics from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. In her free time, she likes to run, swim, listen to music, read, cook, and eat.