Berks

Daly discusses black holes in Universe in Losoncy Lecture Series

In the third annual George J. Losoncy Lecture in Physics and Astronomy, Ruth Daly, professor of physics at Penn State Berks, will give a lecture titled “Black Holes in the Universe” at 5 p.m. Thursday, March 20, in the Perkins Student Center Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public, and it will be preceded by a reception in the Freyberger Gallery at 4:30 p.m., where light refreshments will be served.

The talk is the third in the annual lecture series named in honor of George Losoncy, who was a dedicated Penn State Berks employee for 17 years, serving the campus with perfect attendance, and donating 182 unused sick days when he retired in 2009. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Science Division Colloquia and was particularly interested in physics and astronomy. Upon his retirement, he donated $50,000 to set up a research endowment in physics and astronomy at Penn State Berks.

Daly will explain that our universe has a multitude of black holes, which fall into two main categories: stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes. In this presentation, she will address the current state of our knowledge of black holes, how we know that they are present, and how we figure out their properties. She will discuss masses and spins of black holes and how they are determined and present the implications of black holes for our understanding of structure formation and evolution in the universe.

Working in the fields of extragalactic astrophysics and cosmology for more than 20 years, Daly has published more than 70 papers including more than 40 peer-reviewed publications. She is frequently an invited speaker at major national and international meetings, and her research is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. In 2006, she received the Penn State Berks Outstanding Researcher Award. Prior to this, she was the recipient of a prestigious National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award, a NSF/NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a NASA Graduate Student Researcher Fellowship.

For more information about the George J. Losoncy Lecture in Physics and Astronomy, contact Jianbing Qi, associate professor of physics, at 610-396-6132610-396-6132 or via email at jxq10@psu.edu.

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Dr. Ruth Daly, Professor of Physics at Penn State Berks Credit: Penn StateCreative Commons

Last Updated January 9, 2015

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