Lectures on Tap - Cosmic Cartography: Why We Mapped a Billion Stars

Professors, experts, and storytellers giving thought-provoking lectures in LA bars.

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🧠 Lecture: "Cosmic Cartography: Why We Mapped a Billion Stars"

🎤 Speaker: Prof. Erik Petigura

Join us for a mind-expanding evening exploring how and why we mapped a billion stars. A million miles from Earth lies a peculiar point in space called “L2,” where the gravity of the Sun and Earth reach a special balance. From this vantage, the Gaia spacecraft spent ten years scanning the sky, using the ancient science of astrometry with cutting-edge precision.

Prof. Erik Petigura will guide us from the star charts of the ancient Greeks to the modern era of space telescopes, revealing how mapping the heavens transforms our understanding of the universe. Gaia’s completed observations are expected to reveal 5,000–10,000 new planets, and you’ll get a preview of the strange new worlds likely to be uncovered before the end of the year.

Erik Petigura is an astronomer at UCLA who studies planets around other stars. His research has measured how common Earth-size planets are, probed why some worlds are rocky while others are shrouded in gas, and identified some of the youngest planets known.

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