Robert D. Mathieu

Professor of Astronomy Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Stars that Go Bump in the Night

The distances between the stars are vast, and until recently collisions between stars seemed highly unlikely. Now we think they happen quite frequently, particularly when binary stars encounter each other within clusters of stars, and create stars that as yet are unexplained by standard stellar physics. These events bring together two classical fields of astronomy, stellar dynamics and stellar evolution. I will introduce the audience to the basics of both, and then embark on a journey into the wonderful worlds of star clusters and stellar collisions.

Bob Mathieu has been on the faculty of the Department of Astronomy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1987. He was educated at Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley, after which he became a fellow of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He has served as president of the Board of Directors of the WIYN Observatory, and now chairs the University Committee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research involves the formation and evolution of binary stars and the dynamics of star clusters. He also directs the NSF Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL; http://www.cirtl.net), whose mission is to prepare STEM graduate students to be both forefront researchers and excellent teachers. He also is the principal investigator of an NSF project to upgrade the Student Assessment of Learning Gains (SALG) instrument.