What happens when two stars collide? Why would a star only PRETEND to explode? Can you hide one star inside another? During this talk we’ll take a tour of some of the weirdest stars in the universe, from our nearest neighbors to stars more than 13 billion light years away. We’ll discuss the history of stellar astronomy, learn about some present-day observing techniques and exciting new discoveries, and explore some of the most puzzling and exotic objects being studied by astronomers today.

Bio:
Dr. Emily Levesque is a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She earned a SB in physics from MIT in 2006 and a PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii in 2010. She won the 2014 Annie Jump Cannon prize from the American Astronomical Society and the 2012 Robert J. Trumpler award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for her PhD thesis on the galaxy environments and explosive deaths of massive stars. Her research is focused on improving our overall understanding of massive stars: how they evolve, how we can observe them in distant galaxies, and what we can learn from them about the cosmos.