DePoy to Discuss Planets in Public Lecture at Discovery Center

As part of a statewide celebration of astronomy in commemoration of 2009 as the official International Year of Astronomy, the Don Harrington Discovery Center will host an evening of astronomy Friday (Oct. 2) featuring a free public lecture by Texas A&M University astronomer Dr. Darren DePoy.

DePoy, professor of physics and holder of the Rachel-Mitchell-Heep Endowed Professorship in Physics in the Texas A&M Department of Physics, will present “Planets Around Stars Other than the Sun,” at 7:30 p.m. The talk will be preceded by a 6:30 p.m. reception. Tickets are not required for the reception or the lecture, in which DePoy will describe the planets and planetary systems that are known to exist around other stars, various techniques used to find and measure them, and what their differences and similarities tell us about the formation of planets in general.

DePoy’s lecture marks the ninth event in the year-long International Year of Astronomy (IYA) Texas Speakers’ Series, jointly sponsored by the astronomy programs at Texas A&M and The University of Texas to commemorate IYA, the world-wide celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first astronomical use of the telescope in 1609. The series features astronomers from both universities traveling to cities across the state to present their astronomical research and related topics of interest to area audiences.

DePoy, an international leader in observational astronomy and astronomy instrumentation, joined the Texas A&M faculty in September 2008 after 18 years as a professor and vice chairman for instrumentation in the Astronomy Department at Ohio State University. Prior to that, he held postdoctoral positions at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile (1988-90) and Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona (1987-88).

Internationally recognized for his independent research in astronomy, infrared spectroscopy and extra-solar planets, DePoy has worked on a wide variety of astronomy research topics, including studying stars in the center of the Milky Way galaxy and microlensing events of planets, publishing a number of science projects using his own instrumentation — something considered quite uncommon in his field — along the way.

One of DePoy’s initial projects as head of Texas A&M’s astronomical instrumentation research group involves construction of a significant part of the HETDEX project. HETDEX, or the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment, is the first major experiment to search for and explain dark energy, a mysterious force that comprises nearly 75 percent of the total energy and mass of the Universe and is believed to be responsible for its accelerated expansion as it ages. HETDEX involves utilizing the extensive light-gathering power of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the third-largest telescope in the world, and combining it with a variety of new equipment to study light from far-off galaxies. Texas A&M currently is collaborating with The University of Texas at Austin on the revolutionary $34 million project. In addition, DePoy is the project scientist for the Fermilab instrument, the Dark Energy Camera, scheduled to be installed at Cerro Tololo in Chile in two years.

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Contacts:

R.L. “Chip” Lindsey, Don Harrington Discovery Center Associate Director, (806) 355-9547, ext. 102, chip@dhdc.org

Shana K. Hutchins, Texas A&M University College of Science Communications, (979) 862-1237, shutchins@science.tamu.edu

Keely Finkelstein, Texas A&M University Astrophysics Outreach Coordinator, (979) 862-2105, keelyf@physics.tamu.edu