General Meeting – October 2018

6:30 pm – Introductory Presentation

Title:  Financial Report

Speaker:  Mike McDowell, TAAA Treasurer

TAAA Treasurer Mike McDowell will present the annual TAAA financial report, and an update on Chiricahua Astronomy Complex (CAC).

7:30 pm – Main Presentation

Title:  Dark Clouds and Prestellar Cores – The Beginning Stage of Star and Planet Formation

Speaker:  UA Associate Professor Dr. Yancy Shirley is a Hoosier who received his B.S. in Astronomy and Physics from the University of Arizona, and his Ph.D. at the University of Texas (Austin). He worked at the Very Large Array (radio telescopes) in New Mexico before returning to Arizona and joining the UA faculty in 2008. Dr. Shirley’s main studies are in the earliest phases of star formation, astrochemistry, and astrobiology using observations from infrared and radio telescopes.

In the early 1900s, American astronomer Edward Emerson (E.E.) Barnard photographed dark nebula and realized that these regions were not “vacancies” in the sky, but instead clouds of obscuring material. They contain the raw material—solid particles we call dust and a very rich molecular chemistry—from which stars and planets form today. In his talk, Dr. Shirley will describe how stars and planets form and show how we can observe these earliest phases across the Galaxy.