1 May 2025 – Club Meeting Presentation
— Thursday night, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
This free speaker presentation will be offered in-person at the
UNC-Asheville Reuter Center and virtually online. Registration is not required; use this Zoom link to watch the presentation remotely.
Although parking for this meeting at the Reuter Center is free, you must register your vehicle with a “visitor daily” permit at this link. Once registration is complete, visitors will not need to print or display a permit; the new system utilizes camera-based License Plate Recognition technology. All vehicles must park front-end in, so that the license plate is visible.
An Astronomy Guest Speaker Series Event – a collaboration of the Astronomy Club of Asheville and UNC-Asheville
Microquasars: Black Holes, Superfast Jets, and Fun Physics
– presented by
Diana Hannikainen, Ph.D.,
Editor in Chief, SKY & TELESCOPE
Microquasars are small-scale analogs of distant quasars — instead of a supermassive black hole accreting matter from its host galaxy, microquasars consist of a stellar-mass black hole accreting matter from a companion star. Both systems, though, shoot plasma jets at really high velocities into their surroundings. I’ll review the main characteristics of microquasars and show how studying them yields clues to the physics driving distant quasars.