Monthly Meeting

On August 14, 2019 the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration detected the gravitational waves spawned by a possible neutron star-black hole merger, a rare event which was later designated as GW190814.
An extensive search for an optical counterpart – a kilonova – was undertaken using two instruments located in the Chilean Andes: the DECam imaging camera on the Blanco 4-meter telescope and the Goodman spectrograph on the SOAR 4-meter telescope. Dr. Tucker will describe the detection of GW190814 and the search for its optical counterpart, the results of the search, and the lessons learned for optical follow-up of future gravitational wave detections.

Some of Douglas Tucker’s earliest memories were of the Apollo Moon landings. In college, he majored in physics, and built a Dobsonian 10-inch telescope for an independent studies project. He obtained his Ph.D. in Astronomy at Yale University, studying the clustering of galaxies in the Las Campanas Redshift Survey. He then spent 2 years as a post-doctoral researcher in Germany at the Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam. Afterwards, he moved to Aurora and joined Fermilab’s Experimental Astrophysics Group, where he has worked on the photometric calibrations of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and, more recently, on the Dark Energy Survey.

The public is welcome to attend, free of charge.

This event is open to the public and free of charge.