UH Hilo faculty talk to focus on astronomy

The University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo Faculty Congress and the College of Continuing Education and Community Service (CCECS) hosts a free public presentation by Dr. Kathy Cooksey of the Department of Physics and Astronomy entitled The Universe in Absorption. Cooksey’s talk will be held on Wednesday, July 15, from 6:30 – 7:30 p.m. in UCB 127.

The Universe in Absorption will examine how astronomers study the universe in the absence of light. As light from bright, distant objects traverse the universe, intervening gas clouds absorb the light at wavelengths characteristic of the cloud’s chemical elements. By identifying and modeling the elements associated with absorption-line systems, astronomers learn how gas is processed through and dispersed from galaxies over cosmic time.

Cooksey, an assistant professor of astronomy, earned her Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2009 and was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) until coming to UH Hilo in January 2014. She researches the large-scale gaseous structures in the universe to understand how various elements cycle in and out of galaxies over cosmic time.

For more information or disability accommodations, call 974-7664 (V) or 974-7002 (TTY) by July 3.