Podcaster: Rob Sparks, Dr. Guatham Narayan
Title: All About Supernova
Organization: NOAO
Links: www.noao.edu ; @NOAONorth
Description: Type 1a supernova led to the Nobel Prize winning discovery of dark energy in the 1990s’. However, they still hold many mysteries that astronomers are unraveling today. In this podcast, Dr. Guatham Narayan talks about the work he has done on supernova throughout his career and how he is helping prepare for the next generation of supernova searches.
Bio: Rob Sparks is a science education specialist in the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) group at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and works on the Galileoscope project (www.galileoscope.org), providing design, dissemination and professional development. He blogs at halfastro.wordpress.com.
Gautham Naryan a postdoc at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory working on establishing a network of faint fundamental spectrophotometric standards for future wide-field surveys such as Pan-STARRS and LSST, and studying exploding stars near and far.
He was a graduate student in the Department of Physics and the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University, working for Prof. Christopher Stubbs.
His research interests are in cosmology – he has been working with light curves of type Ia supernovae to measure the equation of state of the dark energy with the ESSENCE project. He has worked on modeling SNIa light curves using low-redshift measurements from Prof. Robert Kirshner’s SN Group at the CfA, and other nearby SN search programs. Dr. Narayan is actively involved in cosmological investigations with variables and explosive transients with Pan-STARRS, particularly if they are SNIa that look funny. He works on pipelines for transient searches, HPC codes, larger than the average simulations, and try to observe as much as he can.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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