Drinks and Astronomy Mash Together on Starry Night
On the windy and star-filled night of Oct. 26, Speakers from UVA and guests came to talk about astronomy and play trivia games in an event called Astronomy on Tap. The event took place at the Champion Grill location in Stonefield. With the event being close to Halloween, costumes were encouraged; The host, Matthew Pryal, even wore a Buzz Lightyear costume. The event started around 7 p.m. with the first speaker being Yao-Lun Yang, a postdoctoral fellow at the department of astronomy at UVA.
Yao-Lun talked about the James Webb Space Telescope, which is planned to launch Dec. 18. The James Webb Space Telescope is tasked to be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It will help people have a better understanding of things like star formations and the universe. He said with this telescope,“We can see much fainter stuff that was previously obscured by dust molecules and allows us to have a totally different view which gives us a way to dissect what’s happening in these star-forming regions.”
After his talk, a trivia game called Higher or Lower was played. The guests were given two astronomy facts and had to decide whether the second fact given had a higher or lower distance or time compared to the previous question. Guests received prizes for winning, such as lanyards and stickers.
After the trivia game the next speaker, an astronomy professor at UVA, was Ed Murphy. Murphy showed the constellations in the sky and told the audience the story of Cassiopeia to explain the names of the constellations. Like how Cassiopeia’s constellation is upside down as punishment from the gods. He jokingly said,“Compared to other Greek stories, it’s a great story to tell to your kids.” Murphy also mentioned a partial lunar eclipse scheduled for Nov. 19 where the moon will turn a “deep red color.”
Due to time constraints, the grab-bag trivia game was skipped and the final speaker was up. Graduate research assistant at UVA, Molly Finn, who studies the formation of stars, talked about two irregular dwarf galaxies which can only be seen from the southern hemisphere called The Magellanic Clouds, which are as old as The Milky Way Galaxy. The two clouds were not originally associated with Ferdinand Magellan, known for his circumnavigation of the world in 1522, and were called names like Nubecula Major and Minor. Magellan became associated with the clouds when sailors would use the name in his honor. Molly Finn said, “Because of its common usage it eventually worked its way up until the 1850s when John Herschel first used a scientific reference to the common name Magellanic clouds.”
Finn also showed a bridge of stars which connects the galaxies known as The Magellanic Bridge. She said, “[it] Further implies that there’s a bunch of strong interactions happening between these two dwarf galaxies, ” that are orbiting each other and causing activity among the stars.
After Finn finished her segment, Pryal thanked all the speakers,volunteers, and members of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society who loaned their telescopes for the people who wanted to observe some of the objects in the sky. Pryal also said to check them out on Facebook and Twitter and “Hopefully we’ll have another event coming to you guys in December.”
