February 18, 2005: Volume 63, Number 7

Astronomer John Huchra to talk Feb. 23

Noted astronomer John Huchra of Harvard University will present a public astronomy talk, "The State of the Universe Report," on Wednesday, Feb. 23, at 8 p.m. in the F.W. Olin Center Auditorium.

His talk, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships Program of the American Astronomical Society. There will be a reception after the talk in the Olin rotunda and an open house in the Union College Observatory.

Huchra will discuss why our best model of the Universe, the hot Big Bang, has recently been put on a much firmer footing by advanced observations, especially those of the Hubble Space Telescope. We have what just might be the final answer on the age and fate of the Universe and the basic parameters of our cosmological model, he says. Or do we? Ninety-five percent of the content of the Universe has only been inferred from theory and observations but remains undetected. Huchra will tell us where we are, how we got there and what problems remain.

Huchra is senior astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Robert O. and Holly Thomis Doyle Professor of Cosmology at Harvard University. He is well known for his work with Harvard collaborator Margaret Geller on measuring the distribution of galaxies in the Universe. Together they showed that galaxies are not distributed randomly in the Universe, but rather inhabit filamentary structures around voids of relatively low galaxy density.

Huchra's visit is made possible by the Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships Program of the American Astronomical Society, which sponsors two-day visits by professional astronomers to college campuses. The program is named in honor of the astronomer Harlow Shapley, a renowned public lecturer and educator, whose research disproved the theory that our solar system is located in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

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