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Commonwealth
2020 Lecture Series: Engaging the Mind
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Steve
Majewski
Associate Professor, Department of Astronomy
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The
Milky Way: Our Cannibalistic Galaxy
Ever
since first gazing into the heavens, humans have constructed stories
to explain the milky white band stretching across the night sky
that we know as the Milky Way. It wasn't until the early twentieth
century that we understood the Milky Way system to be just one
of millions of observable galaxies in the sky. Because of our
location within it, the Milky Way remains the most important laboratory
for understanding the other, more distant stellar systems. In
1992, Steven Majewski published a controversial paper suggesting
that a large fraction of the Milky Way, rather than being formed
15 billion years ago as a unified whole, is, instead, made from
the entrails of smaller galaxies, cannibalized by the Milky Way.
Only three years after his paper appeared, this surprising new
picture of the Milky Way as a galactic gourmand received startling
confirmation with the discovery of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy,
a system in the process of being devoured by our galaxy. Majewski
will explore the history of the Milky Way and Milky Way science
with a focus on this exciting new "dog-eat-dog" picture of galaxies.
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Steven
Majewski, Associate Professor of Astronomy, has been nationally
recognized for his contributions to Galactic astronomy. The recipient
of a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship, a CAREER Award
from the National Science Foundation, and a Cottrell Scholar Award
from The Research Corporation, Majewski was recently named a member
of the Science Team for NASA's Space Inteferometry Mission (SIM),
to be launched in the year 2009. Majewski is the author or coauthor
of more than 100 scholarly articles and books and the editor of
Galaxy Evolution: The Milky Way Perspective and The History of the
Milky Way and Its Satellite System. Prior to coming to the University
of Virginia in 1995, Majewski was a Fellow of the Carnegie Institution
of Washington and a Hubble Fellow of the Space Telescope Science
Institute. Majewski received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago
in 1990.
Visit
Inside UVa Online to read more about Steve Majewski's work at http://www.virginia.edu/insideuva/2001/11/majewski.html
Download
the list of resources for Mr. Majewski's
lecture in pdf format. You need Adobe
Acrobat reader to view this document.
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To
reserve free tickets, email facultyspeakers@virginia.edu
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