Prof. Isabelle Grenier: "New Views of a Vibrant Universe"

The Department of Physics is pleased to announce this year's Robert Hofstadter Memorial Lectures, to be held on March 12 and 13, 2001. This year's invited speaker is Professor Isabelle Grenier, Professor of Astroparticle Physics, University of Paris and research scientist at the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique/Département d'Astrophysique, Saclay, France.  Professor Grenier is internationally known for her work in high-energy astronomy, in particular, for her recent work on determining the nature of unidentified sources of high-energy radiation that appear to be associated with our Galaxy. 

The public lecture, entitled "New Views of a Vibrant Universe," will describe recent discoveries about the nature of powerful, sometimes explosive, sources of energy that are invisible in the optical sky to our naked eye, but dominate the sky when it is viewed through modern astronomical facilities such as the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory or the Chandra X-ray observatory.  Professor Grenier will discuss how observations of these energetic sources are challenging our understanding of the life cycles of matter and energy in the Universe. This lecture will be given on Monday evening, March 12, 2001 at 8:00 PM in the TCSEQ Room 201, 370 Serra Mall, Stanford University. 

The afternoon colloquium will be held on Tuesday, March 13, 2001 at 4:15 PM in the same location.  The colloquium is entitled "Unidentified g-ray sources in the Milky Way: a 25-year old mystery solved?".  This talk will focus on discoveries made with the Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) that flew on the Compton Observatory from 1991 to June 2000. 

Robert Hofstadter was one of the principal scientists who developed the Compton Observatory.