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K-State Today

March 5, 2015

NASA Scientist to give K-State physics lecture on the NuSTAR telescope

Submitted by Kim Coy

Daniel Stern

Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Daniel Stern will talk about NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, launched in 2012, at a public lecture at 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 9, in Town Hall at the Leadership Studies Building. Stern, an astrophysicist, will be featured at the 2015 James R. Neff Lecture in Physics.

The free public talk "Highlights from the NuSTAR Satellite" will not be of a technical level and is geared toward the general public.

Stern will discuss the first telescope in orbit to focus high energy X-ray light. High energy X-ray light provides a unique probe of the most energetic phenomena in the universe, from flares on the surface of the sun, to the explosions of stars, to the extreme environments around neutron stars and black holes.

He will describe highlights from the mission and how they are changing our picture of the extreme universe. The telescope has discovered new classes of objects, such as neutron stars accreting at prodigious rates, and has provided uniquely robust measurements of how fast black holes are spinning.

Light refreshments will be served prior to the lecture at 4 p.m. in 113 Leadership Studies Building.

This lecture series is supported by an endowment from James R. Neff in honor of his parents, Everett and Florine Neff.