[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Wilson_opt.jpg” caption=”Christine Wilson”]It's like a dirty snowball, perhaps one metre to 10 kilometres wide. It's somewhere far from the earth and sun and no one, including astronomer Christine Wilson, knows just where Comet Wilson is.

Wilson discovered the comet in 1986, when she was a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology. “Comet Wilson was the most unbound of any comets they'd seen  its orbit was a hyperbola rather than an ellipse and it was only observable for 18 months  it doesn't look like it's ever going to come back,” she explains.

Christine Wilson is McMaster's only radio astronomy faculty member, frequently carrying out her observational research using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, located in Hawaii.

She is also the Canadian project scientist for the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), the world's largest millimetre wavelength telescope, 5,000 metres above sea level on the Chajnantor plain of the Chilean Andes. The ALMA project is an international partnership, funded in North America by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC).

Wilson will be presenting some of the results of her research on a collision between two spiral galaxies, interstellar medium and star formation in nearby galaxies and our own Milky Way at tonight's Science in the City lecture.

Her talk, Moving Beyond the Visible Universe: Dark Clouds, Galaxy Collisions and the Origin of Stars, will also explore the work she's done on the properties of giant molecular clouds  some a billion times the mass of our own sun.

If you're wondering about the slinky — well, you're just going to have to attend tonight's lecture for a demonstration.

Wilson's talk is free and open to the public. The lecture will be held in the Hamilton Spectator Auditorium, 44 Frid Street in Hamilton. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the lecture begins at 7 p.m.

To reserve your seat e-mail sciencecity@mcmaster.ca or call 905-525-9140, ext. 24934.