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Wyoming Stargazing Speaker Series To Feature NASA Astrophysicist

NASA

The non-profit organization Wyoming Stargazing has been hosting The World Above the Tetons speaker series virtually this spring and will conclude in June with Dr. Michela Negro.

Negro is a researcher at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center where she studies multi-messenger astrophysics. That means she looks not only at visible light but also at other kinds of particles and waves that are produced in space.

"All of them are telling us the same story, basically, the story of our universe," said Negro. "The point is to merge all of the information that we can gather from these different messengers and have a wider and more complete picture of the universe."

But she said it's not easy to detect particles of light, or photons, with high energies.

"You have this photon and you can't just take a picture as in the camera as you have in the phone because those photons are so highly energetic that they just go through it," Negro said. "You need to detect them differently."

During the free event on June 18, Negro will discuss how those detectors, like the Fermi Large Area Telescope, work and why they are important. More information is available on the Wyoming Stargazing website.

Have a question about this story? Please contact the reporter, Ashley Piccone, at apiccone@uwyo.edu.

Ashley is a PhD student in Astronomy and Physics at UW. She loves to communicate science and does so with WPM, on the Astrobites blog, and through outreach events. She was born in Colorado and got her BS in Engineering Physics at Colorado School of Mines. Ashley loves hiking and backpacking during Wyoming days and the clear starry skies at night!
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