Simon Fraser University
SFU Cosmology Seminars

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Wednesday, 26 February 2020, 14:30 in P8445B

Prof. Paul Wiegert (University of Western Ontario)

Interstellar asteroids and comets: what are they and where do they come from?

In 2017, the first asteroid to enter our Solar System from interstellar space was discovered at the PanSTARRS telescope in Hawaii, and has now been named 'Oumuamua, a Hawaiian term which signifies 'Messenger from Afar'. In 2019 a second interstellar visitor, comet Borisov (named after its discoverer) appeared. Adding to the mystery of their origins are their contrasting properties: 'Oumuamua was rocky (unexpected), relatively slow (unexpected) and small (expected); while Borisov is the reverse: icy, fast and large. I'll briefly summarize what we know about these puzzling visitors, and outline the efforts being made at Western to back-track them to their points of origin, somewhere within our Milky Way galaxy.

Seminars in 2019:

2019-09-10 14:30 in P8445B - Gabor Kunstatter (University of Winnipeg/SFU): What can quantum gravity tell us about the beginning and end of time?
2019-09-17 14:30 in P8445B - Andrei Frolov (SFU): Dust is everywhere
2019-10-08 14:30 in P8445B - Douglas Scott (UBC): Evaporating evidence for Hawking points
2019-10-22 14:30 in P8445B - Arif Babul (UVic): Cosmology with galaxy clusters
2019-11-19 14:30 in P8445B - Richard Shaw (UBC): Probing Dark Energy with CHIME
2019-11-26 14:30 in P8445B - Joanna Woo (SFU): Primer on machine learning for astronomy
2019-12-03 14:30 in P8445B - Ludovic Van Waerbeke (UBC): Axion Quark Nuggets: a candidate for baryonic, cold and strongly interacting dark matter
2020-01-20 15:00 in P8445B - Francesc Ferrer (Washington University): Gravitational wave signals of early universe axion dynamics
2020-02-14 14:30 in C9000 - Katie Mack (North Carolina State University): Dark matter: a cosmological perspective (physics colloquium)
2020-02-26 14:30 in P8445B - Paul Wiegert (University of Western Ontario): Interstellar asteroids and comets: what are they and where do they come from?
2020-02-28 14:30 in C9000 - Sara Ellison (University of Victoria): Clash of the Titans: Galaxy mergers in the nearby Universe (physics colloquium)
2020-05-12 12:00 in Zoom - Levon Pogosian (SFU): Relieving the Hubble tension with primordial magnetic fields
2020-05-19 12:00 in Zoom - José Tomas Gálvez Ghersi (University of Mississippi): Numerical renormalization group-based approach to secular perturbation theory
2020-06-02 12:00 in Zoom - Leo Stein (University of Mississippi): Gravitational-wave tests of GR with simulations of beyond-GR theories
2020-06-16 12:00 in Zoom - Andrei Frolov (Simon Fraser Univeristy): Primordial non-Gaussianity from preheating
2020-07-02 14:30 in Zoom - Jack Gegenberg (University of New Brunswick): Collapse of a rotating shell in 3+1 dimensions (special seminar)
2020-07-07 12:00 in Zoom - Joanna Woo (Simon Fraser Univeristy): Machine learning as a tool for astrophysics
2020-07-28 12:00 in Zoom - José Tomas Gálvez Ghersi (University of Mississippi): A fixed point for black hole distributions

[ See complete seminar archives | iCal feed ]

Modified by Andrei Frolov <frolov@sfu.ca> on 2023-11-01