Name: December AAL Club Meeting
Start: 2025-12-07T19:00:00-06:00
End: 2025-12-07T20:00:00-06:00
Location: Baker University Wetlands & Discovery Center

Join us for our Monthly Club Meeting. Dr. Shane Larson of Clarkson University will be presenting A STORM OF STARS: Knowing the Milky Way from Star Counts to Gravitational Waves
For most of human history, we have been aware of the Milky Way, but it is comparatively recent that we have come to understand the Milky Way is our parent galaxy, a vast swirling storm of stars 10 billion years in the making. The story of how we came to understand our home galaxy is one of the central threads in the story of how we have come to understand the Universe far beyond. Historically our ideas about the nature and structure of the Cosmos have grown out of our attempts to understand the Milky Way. For hundreds of years, we didn't know what the Milky Way was, or even that there were other galaxies besides the Milky Way. In this talk, we'll examine the discovery of the Milky Way, and talk about how our perceptions of the Milky Way constantly shape and change our understanding of other galaxies and the Cosmos on much larger scales. There are still some the secrets the galaxy still hides from us, providing astronomers puzzles and challenges to work on for many years yet to come.
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SHORT BIO
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Shane Larson is a professor of Physics at Clarkson University and the Director of Integrated Engineering and Applied Science Projects in the Coulter School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He works in the field of gravitational wave astrophysics, specializing in studies of compact stars, binaries, and the galaxy with both the ground-based LIGO project, and the forthcoming space-based observatory LISA. He is an award winning teacher, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is an avid amateur astronomer, observing with two homebuilt Dobsonians, a 12.5" named EQUINOX and a 22" named COSMOS MARINER. He contributes regularly to a public science blog at writescience.wordpress.com, and posts at Bluesky with the handle @sciencejedi .