The Sunshine Coast chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada welcomes UBC profession Douglas Scott as its Nov. 14 guest speaker.
Scott received his bachelor’s degree in 1986 from the University of Edinburgh, and his doctoral degree in 1991 from the University of Cambridge. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 1991 to ‘95 and has been a UBC faculty member since 1995.
His specialty is cosmology and he does research in structure formation, cosmic microwave background, early universe, high redshift galaxies and sub-millimetre observations.
His talk will be on Planck, the Universe, and Everything. The Planck satellite has completed its mission to map the entire microwave sky at nine separate frequencies. This enables us to learn about the physics of the interstellar medium in our galaxy, and to remove this foreground emission in order to extract the cosmological information from the background radiation. Planck’s measurements led to an improved understanding of the basic model, which describes the universe on the very largest scales.
And although we can now define the cosmos in terms of a few basic assumptions and a handful of numbers, of course many questions remain unanswered. Planck analysis continues, with the release of polarization information expected before the end of 2014, enabling new science issues to be addressed.
The meeting takes place at 7:30 p.m. at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre in Sechelt. See more details at www.coastastronomy.ca
