Exoplanets & Alien Life – Jan 29
Humanity has looked up at the stars for millennia and wondered whether we’re alone in the Universe. Yet only in the past few decades have we begun to discover planets outside our Solar System: to date, we’ve found over 4,000 such “exoplanets.” Further, we have statistical reasons to believe that roughly one billion exoplanets — in our Galaxy alone — are promising abodes for life. Come learn about exoplanets and the exciting search for Earth-like and potentially habitable worlds.
Our speaker, Andy Mayo, is a PhD student and researcher in the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department. He is also a Wonderfest Science Envoy.
Andrew Mayo
What value will these insights have for you? Via the Eventbrite portal below, please consider a donation to nonprofit Wonderfest in accord with this value.
Halloween is the perfect day for a deep and magical dialogue on the supernatural! Michael Shermer is the founder of The Skeptics Society, and monthly contributor to Scientific American magazine. He has written over a dozen books, including The Moral Arc and Why People Believe Weird Things, and he has appeared on The Colbert Report, Dateline, and Charlie Rose. Jamy Ian Swiss is a world-renowned magician and skeptic. He has been featured in print in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and on television on 48 Hours, PBS’s NOVA, The Today Show, AND he was a comedy writer and chief magic consultant for Penn & Teller. Please join Shermer and Swiss as they discuss the supernatural — on Halloween — with science and skepticism in mind.
Whether you’re a NightLife regular or rookie, Wonderfest’s Cosmic NightLife is not to be missed. It features three of the most exciting and insightful space experts in the Bay Area — and perhaps on planet Earth. Here’s the schedule and line-up:
Join us for a fascinating journey through the early universe using the latest computer animations of early star formation, supernova explosions, and the build-up of the first galaxies. Dr. Abel’s work has shown that the first luminous objects in the universe were very massive stars shining one million times as brightly as our Sun. They died quickly and seeded the cosmos with the chemical elements necessary for life. One star at a time, galaxies started to assemble just one hundred million years after the Big Bang, and they are still growing now. Computer simulations of these events use the physics of dark matter, of ordinary atoms & molecules, and of expanding space to deliver remarkable insights into the early history of the cosmos.