Intergalactic Immigration by Professor Jessica Werk
Note: The speaker will not be appearing in-person and will be speaking to us via Zoom from the Seattle area.
Our speaker will be Professor Jessica Werk from the Astronomy Department at the University of Washington. Professor Werk explores the question of how the elements that are created within stars, including those essential to our planet and ourselves, circulate within and between galaxies. She is an excellent speaker and a very popular instructor. Please see below for Professor Werk's description of her presentation.
Both observational, spectroscopic data and theoretical analyses indicate that the majority of the atoms in our galaxy and on our planet did not originate within our own galaxy, and were likely fused in stars in long-dead satellite galaxies. These atoms have been cycling over vast scales for billions of years, swept up in dramatic winds, and caught in filamentary accretion flows onto galaxies. In this talk, I’ll review these processes and how we observe them.
About Professor Jessica Werk
University of Washington Professor Jessica Werk studies the cosmic baryon cycle by observing matter on the smallest, atomic scales as it courses through the vast spaces between galaxies. She uses spectrographs, such as the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope, to measure atomic transitions from gas billions of light years away. She serves as the Associate Chair, Undergraduate Advisor, and Associate Professor in the Astronomy department at the University of Washington. After her first observing trip to Kitt Peak in 2001 as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University (in Middletown CT), she has dedicated her time to understanding galaxy evolution via spectroscopic observations. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2010, completed two postdoctoral fellowships, including a Hubble Fellowship at UC Santa Cruz, and then joined the faculty at the University of Washington. She has been lucky enough to receive recognition for her work in the form of a Sloan Fellowship, Cottrell Scholarship, and a recent grant from NSF-CAREER. She is a frequent user of the Hubble Space telescope.