Join us to learn about the secrets of the cosmos from John Mulchaey, the Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair and Director of the Carnegie Observatories.
This is the 50th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. This remarkable satellite was named in honor of Carnegie astronomer Edwin Hubble, who discovered that the Milky Way is just one galaxy in the universe. A tour through the Hubble Deep Field, Mulchaey’s “favorite image of all time” is made up of 23 days worth of exposure of one small patch of the sky. It would take 30 million patches this size to cover the entire sky. Despite this, the image alone contains 10,000 galaxies, giving us an idea of the universe’s tremendous size.
Mulchaey is an expert on on groups and clusters of galaxies—most of which, including our own Milky Way, exist collectively. These systems can be important laboratories for studying the processes that shape galaxies throughout their lifetimes, from their formation to through their evolution. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and joined the Carnegie Observatories staff in 1999 and was appointed Director in 2015. He oversees the Observatories’ main campus in Pasadena as well as its facilities in Las Campanas, Chile. He also serves on the board for the Giant Magellan Telescope, currently under construction at Las Campanas.
April 9, 2020
