The next meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society will be on
Saturday, July 12, 2025
at the
Cernan Earth and Space Center.
Meeting Agenda:
5:15 PM -- Astro-talk over pizza and soft drinks. (Donations are welcome to offset the cost of food and beverage.)
5:30 PM -- Safe telescopic viewing of the Sun. Weather permitting!
7:00 PM -- The LECTURE will begin
Speaker: Dr. Joshua Burton
Topic: Things That Are Round
About the Presentation:
Snowballs, rocks, metal ingots and gravel piles come in many shapes, as long as they're not too big.
However, every solid body larger than Ceres (that is, roughly, Texas) is pulled by gravity into a sphere.
The pressures, temperatures, and phases of matter inside planets and stars are all outside our everyday
experience, but from a dwarf planet (10^21 kg) to a supergiant star (10^33 kg) is a trillion fold range
of masses, so we shouldn't be surprised that All Round Things Are Not Alike. Dr. Burton will talk a bit
about all the exciting things that happen in the middle.
About our Speaker:
Dr. Joshua Burton earned his Ph.D. in 1990 from UC Berkeley, where he worked with Mary K. Gaillard and
Bruno Zumino during the exciting early years of supergravity and string theory. He has held research
appointments at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Harvard, Brown, and Northwestern, publishing original
work on supersymmetry, particle astrophysics, cosmology, and high-energy physics beyond the Standard Model.
In 1997, a friend's start-up company lured him away from academia into software, and through acquisition he
eventually wound up at IBM. He retired in 2016 to return to his true calling as a physics educator and now
teaches physics and runs the astronomy club at our award-winning local Proviso Mathematics and Science Academy.
Joshua at the September 2023 CAS meeting
Looking Ahead: The August meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society (CAS) will be on
Saturday, August 2, 2025
at the Cernan Earth and Space Center at 5:15 PM.
Event Calendar
