Conversations at the Meetinghouse

November 7th

7 PM

Sharon Unitarian Church

4 North Main Street, Sharon

Our Galactic

Neighborhood

Jon Slavin

If you look up at the sky and wonder what you are looking at, as humans have for thousands of years, this is your chance to know what the scientist sees.

You may have heard that for the first time a man-made

object, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, has recently crossed into the interstellar space. But what does that mean exactly and what’s out there for Voyager to explore?

In this talk Jon will discuss the nearest regions of our Galaxy starting from Earth and moving out from there to discuss the heliosphere and those regions of space known as the Local Interstellar Medium. How far is far? How big is big? He will be discussing the questions being asked by researchers and how they go about seeking answers.

Jon Slavin is an Astrophysicist and researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The CfA is a joint institute of Harvard University and the Smithsonian. Jon has a BS in physics from Georgetown and a PhD in Physics from University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has worked at the University of Colorado at Boulder, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and NASA Ames Research Center in California. FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC