posted on Oct. 4: Astronomer Beckwith brings the universe to McMaster

A painting, a poem and the universe: that's what American astronomer Steven Beckwith brought to an overflow audience in the Health Sciences Centre last evening during the first of this year's two Whidden Lectures, given under the whimsical title Rocket Science and Little Green Men: The Universe from Orbit. Last night's talk by Beckwith, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute and professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., was called Where Did We Come From? Where Are We Going? In his second lecture tonight, called Looking for Life in the Galaxy, he will discuss new space technologies that will allow us to search for signs of life on planets orbiting other stars. The lecture will take place in HSC-1A1 at 8 p.m. Last night, Beckwith discussed how scientists from Galileo to American astronomer Edwin Hubble to modern researchers have observed the night sky and developed ideas to explain an enduring mystery: the origins and continued unfolding of our universe. Against an opening slide backdrop of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night, he said, "Asking where we came from and where we're going is a deep-rooted notion in people." It was Hubble who first got an inkling not just of the size of the universe but of its continual expansion, an observation that underpins the Big Bang theory of the universe's origins. "This was a really remarkable discovery," Beckwith said, pointing out that Hubble's work in the 1920s still guides much of modern astronomy. Perhaps no more visible proof of that lies in the Hubble space telescope. Launched in 1990, the telescope orbits above the earth's atmosphere to provide a clear-eyed view of the universe in greater detail than ever. Beckwith said the school-bus-sized instrument allows us to "look at a time when stars and galaxies were first being created. That's what Hubble has done."

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