AstronomyTeacher

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006, 7 pm:

Astronomer Ron Marzke
of San Francisco State University
will give a non-technical, illustrated talk on:

News from the Distant Past: How Galaxies Tell Their Stories
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in the Smithwick Theater,
Foothill College,
El Monte Road and Freeway 280,
in Los Altos Hills, California.

Free and open to the public.
Parking on campus costs $2.

Call the series hot-line at 650-949-7888 for
more information and driving directions.

No background in science will be required for
this talk.
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Dr. Marzke will discuss how astronomers are taking
advantage of the "time machine" built into the travel
time of light in the universe to understand how
galaxies like our own Milky Way formed and evolved.

Light from distant galaxies can take billions of
years to reach our telescopes. But when the light
finally arrives, it brings us news of ancient cosmic
events as they unfold. Dr. Marzke is part of a team
of astronomers who have recently found major
surprises in the light of galaxies from far away and
long ago. In particular, they discovered a surprisingly
large population of massive galaxies which were
already fully assembled when the universe was
less than half its current age.

Dr. Marzke is an associate professor in the
Department of Physics and Astronomy at San
Francisco State. He specializes in measurements
of the structure of galaxies and the stars they contain,
as well as the large-scale distribution of the galaxies.
He is a member of the Gemini Deep-Deep Survey
team, which is probing the history of galaxies.

Co-sponsored by:
* NASA Ames Research Center
* The Foothill College Astronomy Program
* The SETI Institute
* The Astronomical Society of the Pacific.