Foreseen by Einstein almost a century ago, gravitational waves were for a long time the last prediction of his theory of general relativity left to be confirmed. Last September, LIGO directly observed these waves being emitted from the merging of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away. Thus, we opened a new window into the workings of our universe. In this talk, Alex Rachkov will cover what these mysterious waves are, recount the long journey of their discovery and the significance they have for the future of astronomy.

Dr. Wendy Taylor talks about the science of antimatter. What is it? How is it made, trapped, studied and used? And what can it tell us about how the universe works?

Meteroids, asteroids, comets and dwarf planets are some of the smallest bodies in our solar system and are the focus of several recent space missions: Rosetta, Dawn, and New Horizons. Learn about how Pluto, Ceres and these other tiny wonders continue to amaze and surprise us.

Professor James Wadsley is a computational astrophysicist at McMaster University. He makes computer simulations of things that take millions of years to unfold on the sky. He will talk about "the secret lives of galaxies" which demonstrates the evolution of a galaxy in both what we see, and in ways we can't, over the full age of the universe.

In his Perimeter Public Lecture, 2015 Nobel Prize-winner Art McDonald will explain how researchers created an ultra-clean underground lab to obtain otherwise-impossible measurements to study fundamental physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.

http://www.sciencerendezvous.ca/category/toronto/

Astronomer Paul Mortfield will be joining the Hamilton Centre at the April meeting to discuss hunting for Exoplanets! Who can attend: EveryoneFee: FreeReservations: Not required Organized by: RASC - Hamilton CentreLocation: Royal Canadian Legion – Branch 551, 79 Hamilton St. N., Waterdown, ON L0R 2H0

Stars are distant suns. Like our sun, they are born in interstellar clouds of gas and dust, and live long and relatively uneventful lives. In death, sun-like stars swell up into “red giants,” and cast off their outer layers into space, revealing a “white dwarf” core, a million times denser than water. Rare, massive stars die even more spectacularly, exploding as super-novas, and leaving “neutron stars” or “black holes behind. We owe our existence to star life and star death!

The Stargazers' Group of Mississauga will be observing Earth Hour on Saturday, March 19, 2016 at J.C. Saddington Park at the bottom of Mississauga Road, in the South Parking Lot from around 8:30pm.

We’ll take a tour, from our own backyard out to the edge of the observable Universe using real photographs and images from amateur and professional astronomers, as well as space-borne telescopes. With Chris Vaughan (aka @astrogeoguy), we’ll take time to appreciate the beauty of the images and learn some fascinating science behind each of them. The Aurorae, the Sun, mighty Jupiter and beautiful Saturn, the most beautiful parts of our own galaxy, and our distant neighbours will be delights for the eyes.