Colloquium: “Dirty Fireballs and Cows: Investigating the Extremes of Stellar Death”

The Syracuse University Department of Physics is pleased to welcome Dr. Anna Ho, assistant professor of astronomy at Cornell University, for her talk titled ‘Dirty Fireballs and Cows: Investigating the Extremes of Stellar Death.’

Cosmic explosions (“transients”) impact nearly all areas of astronomy, from the origin of the elements and nature’s most exotic objects (black holes, neutron stars) to the expansion of the universe. Recent years saw major developments in transient observations, including daily movies of the entire night sky by optical telescopes. In this talk, Dr. Ho will describe the emerging landscape of optical transients that last only a few minutes to a few days. She will discuss the implications of such fleeting phenomena for our understanding of stellar evolution, black-hole formation and relativistic particle acceleration.

Anna Ho received a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Caltech, for which she was awarded a Springer Thesis Prize. She spent two years as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley before joining Cornell as an assistant professor in 2022. She is a 2024 Sloan Research Fellow in Physics and a 2024 Packard Fellow.