Agenda:
7:00 - 7:15 General Meeting & Announcements
7:15 - 7:30 Short topic presentation by a club member
7:30 - 7:45 Refreshment break
7:45 - Public Presentation
Speaker:
Dr. Rana Ezzeddine, Assistant Astronomy Professor, UF
Title:
Galactic Archaeology with the Oldest Stars
Abstract:
The oldest stars found in Milky Way Galaxy, and its satellite dwarf galaxies, retain in their atmospheres the chemical footprints of the high redshift, early Universe. Employing “Galactic archaeology” – the diverse use of the chemical and dynamical properties of old stars – I aim to answer outstanding questions about the early Universe, the nature of the first stars and supernovae explosions (SNe), and the relevant nucleosynthesis processes responsible for the formation and evolution of the chemical elements as we observe them in the present day. In this talk, I will invite the audience to join me into a journey back to the beginning of the Universe, a few minutes after the Big Bang, to reveal how we use observations of the oldest stars in the Galaxy to understand its early moments of star and element formation, as well as their evolution until the present day.
Particularly, I will touch on exciting recent advancements in our understanding of the formation of the heaviest elements in the early Universe, particularly highlighting where and how all the Gold and Uranium (and other radioactive elements) formed in the Universe.
Research Interests:
Dr. Rana Ezzedine is an assistant professor and Astrophysicist at the University of Florida. Her scientific research covers a range of topics in stellar astrophysics. She is primarily interested in observing and interpreting the physical and chemical properties and signatures of first and second generation of stars, to decipher the observational evidence of early star formation, the origin and evolution of stellar populations, and the chemical enrichment events that lead to the present-day abundance distribution of elements via chemical evolution of the Galaxy.
About the speaker:
Dr. Ezzedine is originally from Beirut, Lebanon but has lived on three different continents. She grew up in Zurich, Switzerland, and was the first Arab to receive a joint masters in Astrophysics at Notre Dame University and Université de Saint Joseph in Lebanon. She received her PhD degree from the Université de Montpellier in France. After that, she was a JINA-CEE Postdoctoral Fellow and Heising-Simons Fellow at the Kavli Space Science Center at MIT. In January of 2020 she became faculty at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Florida.