Events - Event View

Our speaker this month is Dr. Diana Hannikainen. Dr. Hannikainen's talk is "The Radio Sky: Exploring the Universe at the Longest Wavelengths". 

Following the pioneering work of Karl Jansky and Grote Reber in the 1930s, radio astronomy really took off with the advances of radar technology during World War II. Engineers have devised ingenious contraptions to capture the longest wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum arriving at Earth from the farthest reaches of the cosmos. In tonight's talk Dr. Hannikainen will walk us through the historical steps that led to today's gargantuan arrays. Along the way she will highlight groundbreaking discoveries and show how they influenced our understanding of the universe. Hannikainen will conclude with some examples of her own research in microquasars and discuss how radio data complete the picture when interpreting data at other wavelengths.

Dr. Hannikainen attended the University of Edinburgh for her undergraduate studies, and later obtained her PhD in high-energy astrophysics from the University of Helsinki. Following that, she held a postdoctoral position at the University of Southampton, and then returned to Helsinki where she received a Fellowship from the Academy of Finland. She was lucky to have forged a close collaboration already during her PhD studies with the University of Sydney, which provided her with much-needed escapes to the Southern Hemisphere during the cold Nordic winter months. Her research focused on radio and X-ray observations and analyses of X-ray binaries, specifically those dubbed "microquasars," i.e., X-ray binaries that exhibit jets akin to their extragalactic counterparts, quasars. Dr. Hannikainen currently works at Sky & Telescope magazine in the capacity of Observing Editor.