Theme: "Telling Time By The Stars"

This TEDxPasadenaSalon will bring together the Pasadena community, space lovers, and more for an afternoon of celestial education at the historic Carnegie Observatories. In 1904, George Ellery Hale founded Mount Wilson Solar Observatory, with the support of Carnegie Institute of Washington. Host to the largest (at the time of their construction) telescopes in the world, the Observatory transformed astronomy and astrophysics—the globular cluster system of the galaxy was mapped, the expanding universe was discovered, and the empirical basis for theories of stellar structure and evolution were all established at Carnegie Observatory. The main offices of the Carnegie Observatories continue to be located in Pasadena, California, with about 65 scientific, support, and technical staff in residence.

TEDxPasadenaSalon speaker, Jennifer van Saders, is an expert in the interior workings and life-cycles of Sun-like stars. She is particularly interested in stars as the timepieces that mark the history of the galaxy, and the ways in which stellar life-cycles affect their planetary companions. She has worked extensively with data from the space-based observatory Kepler, which has offered deep and novel insights into the lives of stars. Jennifer is also a Carnegie-Princeton Postdoctoral Fellow based at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California.

Dr. van Saders will be introduced by Dr. John Mulchaey, Director and Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Today, Mulchaey oversees Carnegie’s main campus in Pasadena as well as The Observatories’ large-telescopes facility in Las Campanas, Chile. He also serves on the Board for the Giant Magellan Telescope, a next-generation telescope being designed in Pasadena.

The Carnegie Observatories
813 Santa Barbara St
Pasadena, California, 91101
United States

Jennifer van Saders

Carnegie-Princeton Fellow

Jennifer van Saders is an expert in the interior workings and life-cycles of Sun-like stars. She is particularly interested in stars as the timepieces that mark the history of the galaxy, and the ways in which stellar life-cycles affect their planetary companions. She has worked extensively with data from the space-based observatory Kepler, which has offered deep and novel insights into the lives of stars. Jennifer is a Carnegie-Princeton Postdoctoral Fellow based at Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California.