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Gamma-ray bursts focus of Dec. 8 Director's Colloquium

A few times a day the sky is lit up by brilliant flashes of gamma-rays, and, though discovered more than three decades ago, astronomers at that time were in the dark about the origins of these bursts. Advances in gamma-ray research and subsequent findings will be the focus of a Director's Colloquium at 1:10 p.m., Dec. 8, in the Physics Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3.

Shrinivas Kulkarni will speak on "The Brilliant Gamma-ray Bursts: Death Cries Across the Universe." The bursts appear to mark the death of massive stars and may well be the birth cries of newly formed rapidly spinning black holes, Kulkarni said.

Kulkarni is a McArthur professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at the California Institute of Technology. He served as the executive officer for astronomy from 1997-2000 at Caltech.

Kulkarni earned his master's degree in physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, India and his doctorate in radio astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. He served a brief period as a postdoc at UC, Berkeley and Caltech before joining the faculty at Caltech in 1987.

Kulkarni's awards include the Alan T. Waterman Prize of the National Science Foundation, a fellowship from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, a Presidential Young Investigator award from the NSF, the Helen B. Warner award of the American Astronomical Society and the Janksy Prize of Associated Universities Inc. Kulkarni was elected a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society (1994), Fellow of the Royal Society (2001) and the National Academy of Sciences this year.

The talk is by open to all badge holders. The colloquium will be broadcast live on Labnet Channel 9 and can be accessed via the Internet using Real Media Player and IPTV technology.

For information about the Director's Colloquium program, go to http://stb.lanl.gov:8080/wosaserver/web?pg=/program/colloquium/index.xmlonline.

-- Kathryn Ostic

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