Department of Physics, Astronomy and Geosciences – Fall 2022 Seminar Series
Join the Department of Physics, Astronomy and Geosciences Department for the
Fall 2022 Seminar Series featuring:
Jayant Murthy, PhD
Indian Institute of Astrophysics
“Nightfall: An Asimov Tribute or How I made it into Wikipedia“
Nightfall is widely considered the best science fiction short story ever written. It is set on the planet Lagash in a system with 5 suns. As a result, there is never any darkness except for one day every 2049 years when a combination of planetary motions results in darkness covering the entire planet. Civilization collapses in fire and must be built again from scratch. Asimov himself did not worry about whether the system was possible or not as his focus was on the sociology of such a system. The Kepler satellite has now found an incredible variety of planets including worlds with 5 suns and I decided to look at the characteristics of such a system and to flesh out the physical details. We made this into a summer project with a student, wrote up the work and put it on ArXiv. It turned out to be the most popular thing I’ve ever done. I will describe the background to the story, the context and the work we did.
Friday, September 16, 2022
11:00am-12:00pm
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Categorised in: General
This post was written by Charles, Amanda G.