The Chicago Astronomical Society
Meeting Friday, April 14, 2017 at the Adler Planetarium

6:00 PM
No telescope viewing because of cloudy weather.

6:30 PM
President Tony Harris welcomed an enthusiastic crowd.

Larry Silvestri & Drew Carhart  led a light pollution discussion and update on the Chicago Smart Lighting Project before the official 7PM start of the CAS meeting.

 7:00 PM
CAS Meeting began

Dave Fuller explored the upcoming night sky for the month of April.

Main lecture
"Simulating the compact binary populations of the Milky Way"
by Ms. Katie Breivik.
The compact binary population of the Milky Way, comprised of pairs of stellar remnants, makes up a significant fraction of the stars in the galaxy. Stellar remnants are dim by nature but are the densest objects in the Universe, making them excellent sources of gravitational radiation at milli-Hertz frequencies and observable by a proposed space-based gravitational wave mission: LISA. In the years preceding LISA's launch, predictions can be made for what types of compact binary populations will be observed by simulating their evolution from birth to their current remnant state. Ms. Breivik  talked about her thesis work to simulate these populations to make predictions and inform our understanding of binary star evolution once observations are made.
Ms. Breivik is originally from Salt Lake City, Utah and became interested in astronomy at a very young age by going to local star parties run by the Salt Lake Astronomical Society.  She held onto that interest through her K-12 schooling and eventually completed a B.S. in Physics in 2012 at Utah State University, a small state university ten miles south of the Utah border with Idaho. After getting her degree in Utah, she pursued graduate school in Georgia for a year at the University of Georgia and finally transferred to Northwestern University in fall of 2013 where she has continued her graduate studies.



9:00 Meeting ended and we departed for Connie’s.