Nov 13, 2012

Professor Dan McCammon, UW-Madison Physics Department

"High Resolution X-ray Spectroscopy — a New Window on the Universe"

The X-ray sky reveals a host of unexpected objects: black holes, neutron stars, bubbles of million-degree gas, and 3/4 of the known normal matter in the universe were all first seen in X-rays.  But in astronomy much of our detailed knowledge of what is going on depends on spectroscopy, and the lack of sensitive, high resolution spectroscopic instruments in the X-ray range has limited how much we have learned about these exotic systems.  Professor McCammon will talk about efforts at the University of Wisconsin to develop a new class of X-ray detectors that helps fill this gap, and about the continuing effort to get these detectors into space.