KUCHING: Want to know how planets around other stars are formed, how exoplanets are detected and what we currently know about exoplanets and their properties?
If you are, then head to Planetarium Sultan Iskandar at the Civic Centre here on April 27.
All these will be unveiled at a talk, jointly organised by Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), the Jordell Bank Centre for Astrophysics and Planetarium Sultan Iskandar (PSI) at the Planetarium Sultan Iskandar; it is scheduled to start at 10am.
Admission to the talk is free. Those who wish to attend must register by contacting PSI at 082-251275 or by sending an email to psi@planetarium-sarawak.org
The two-hour talk will be divided into two sessions.
The first session titled “Exoplanets – Planets in the Other Solar System” will be conducted by Professor Gary Fuller.
The other, entitled “The Future of the Sun”, will be presented by Professor Albert Zijlstra.
Fuller, who holds a PhD in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley, is an expert in star formation, molecular clouds, radio astronomy, sub-millimetre astronomy, instrumentation development.
Zijlstra, who studied at University of Manchester’s Jordell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, School of Physics and Astronomy, will introduce how the sun gets its energy from nuclear fusion, slowly turning hydrogen into helium, and what could possibly happen when the hydrogen runs out.
Zijlstra is a professor in astrophysics with research interests in late stages of stellar evolution, asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, planetary nebulae and nearby galaxies.
