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December 26, 2016

Seminars for Gender Equality Promotion

We will hold two seminars by Prof. Chris Done (Durham University, UK), co-hosted by Graduate School of Science and Center for Gender Equality Promotion, Osaka University. All faculty and students are welcome, so please come and join us.

Date
Thu. 19th January 2017, 15:00-16:30
Fri. 20th January 2017, 10:30-12:00

Place
School of Science Building D&F

Program
First Seminar
‘Rocket science:
How I got to be the first woman Astrophysics professor in Durham’
Prof. Chris Done (Durham University, UK)
Thu. 19th January 2017, 15:00-16:30@Room#D501, School of Science Building D
I will talk about how I choose a career in Astrophysics, working on black holes, and how this led me into rocket science. There are not many women in Physics, especially 30 years ago when I started, and always standing out and looking different can be difficult. I will talk about some of the barriers women face in a Physics career as well as the amazing opportunities – I worked in the USA for two years at NASA, where an unexpected highlight was being in the control room flying an X-ray telescope in the space shuttle payload bay! And now I work for JAXA and live in Japan for a year! I have the best job I can imagine, where I get paid to think about black holes and travel the world.

Second Seminar
‘Black holes and Einstein’s gravity’
Prof. Chris Done (Durham University, UK)
Fri. 20th January 2017, 10:30-12:00@Room#F608, School of Science Building F
I will review what we know about the accretion flow in the stellar mass black hole binary systems, and show how we can use them to test Einstein’s General Relativity in strong gravity with observational evidence for the event horizon and the last stable circular orbit. I will also talk about our new result on the first detection of Lense Thirring (relativistic vertical) precession in the strong field limit in these systems. This solves the 30 year mystery of the origin of the characteristic timescale seen in these objects, as well as being the first test of this prediction of Einstein’s gravity in the strong field limit. Gravitational waves from merging black holes are the ultimate test of strong gravity, and the recent advanced LIGO results are fantastic confirmation that General Relativity really does describe what we see.

Co-hosted by Graduate School of Science and Center for Gender Equality Promotion, Osaka University

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