Meetings
Map of UOP
University of the Pacific, Olson Hall Room 120
7:30 PM Thursday September 12th
Stockton Astronomical Society
Presents
Rebecca Lewis
Rebecca Lewis is a senior undergraduate student at the University
of California, Los Angeles majoring in Astrophysics and minoring
in Geophysics and Planetary Physics. In her junior year, she
became involved in research about the climate of Titan, the largest
moon of Saturn. Her project concerns how liquid methane
precipitation and surface hydrology on Titan shape its landscape,
and the project is currently being funded by the Straus Family
Fund for Undergrad Opportunity. Additionally, Rebecca joined the
UCLA Galactic Center Group in the summer of 2019 as an
undergraduate student researcher. There she studies stellar
populations in the Nuclear Star Cluster in the Galactic Center of
the Milky Way galaxy. She has been a member of the Stockton
Astronomical Society (SAS) since spring 2012 when she won a
telescope in the SAS Striking Sparks program. She has also served
as the SAS Newsletter Editor since November 2014.
Stellar Populations in the Galactic Center
The Galactic Center of our galaxy is a strange environment for star
formation and evolution. It contains our galaxy’s supermassive
black hole, Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), a
behemoth 4.3 million times as massive as our Sun. The Galactic
Center also has a high density of stars, over 10 million per cubic
parsec. In our region of the galaxy, the density of stars is much
lower at about 0.1 stars per cubic parsec. In this talk, I will discuss
what types of stellar populations exist in our Galactic Center,
particularly in the Nuclear Star Cluster. I will also describe the
difficulties that come with trying to observe stars in the Galactic
Center because of the high density of stars and the
large amount of gas and dust in the region.
