March 2010 NUI Galway Announce Details of Final Astronomy Lecture

NUI Galway's Centre of Astronomy and School of Physics has announced details of the final talk in their series of public Astronomy lectures. This free event will take place at 7.30pm on Wednesday, 24 March, in the McMunn Theatre, Arts and Science Building, NUI Galway. The lecture, entitled 'The Very High Energy Universe', will be delivered by Dr Mark Lang, Head of the School of Physics at NUI Galway. Dr Lang will describe the latest results from two special telescopes, the VERITAS ground-based telescopes and the NASA s Fermi space telescope. VERITAS is an array of ground-based gamma-ray telescopes located in Southern Arizona. The Gamma-Ray Astronomy Group at NUI Galway is a member of the international collaboration which operates the telescopes. NUI Galway post-graduate students have travelled to Arizona to help build the array and to use it to carry out observations. NASA s Fermi telescope is a space based telescope which can search the entire sky for sources of high energy gamma-radiation every three hours. It detects radiation which has slightly lower energies than that seen by VERITAS. Commenting on the lecture, Dr Lang said: "In the 'ordinary' Universe, stars shine because they are warm and we can see visible light from them with our eyes or through optical telescopes. But there is also an 'extraordinary' Universe in which exotic astrophysical objects produce very high energy radiation that we can detect using special telescopes. Sources include super-massive black holes at the centres of distant galaxies and the remains of nearby massive stars which have exploded as supernovae". The Gamma-Ray Astronomy Group at NUI Galway is part of the Centre for Astronomy and currently consists of Dr Gary Gillanders and Dr Mark Lang and postgraduate researchers Andrea Cesarini, Fr Michael Connolly and Dawn McMorrow. More details of all the talks can be found on http://astro.nuigalway.ie/outreach.php. -Ends-