Astro Seminar Series - VIA ZOOM

Professor Laura Fissel is an astrophysicist in the Department of Physics, Engineering Physics and Astronomy at Queen's University.  Her research focuses on building stratospheric balloon-borne telescopes, which operate above 99.5% of the Earth's atmosphere, allowing astronomers to observe radiation that would otherwise require a much more expensive space telescope.  She uses both balloon telescopes and ground-based telescopes to study how stars and planets form out of interstellar gas and dust. Professor Fissel received her PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the University of Toronto in 2013, then worked as a CIERA/NSERC postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL and as a Jansky postdoctoral fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.  She joined Queen's University as an assistant professor in September 2019.

Talk Title and Abstract:

Studying star formation with stratospheric balloon-borne telescopes

"An important mystery in astrophysics is why is the conversion of interstellar gas into stars so inefficient?  We typically observe of order 1% the star formation rate expected from a free-fall gravitational collapse. This low efficiency is likely due to regulation from a combination of turbulent gas motions, magnetic fields, and feedback from young stars.  Of these processes the role played by magnetic fields is particularly poorly understood, largely because of the difficulty of observing magnetic fields. 

In this talk I will discuss what we have learned about the role of magnetic fields in star formation by mapping polarized dust emission with stratospheric balloon-borne telescopes that operate above 99.5% of the Earth’s atmosphere.  I will discuss results from the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Sub-mm Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol), which launched from Antarctica in 2010 and 2012.  By statistically comparing BLASTPol polarization maps of the nearby giant molecular cloud Vela C with simulations of magnetized star formation, we find that magnetic fields have played an important role in the formation of both low- and high-density molecular gas sub-structures. In the near-future large focal-plane polarimeters like TolTEC on the LMT and PrimeCam on the Fred Young Sub-mm Telescope (FYST/CCATp) will study magnetic fields for dozens of clouds, but with the ability to resolve fields in cores (the precursors to individual stellar systems).  Finally, I will talk about our quest to build a next-generation submm balloon-borne “BLAST Observatory” to probe the nature of interstellar dust, study the interplay between magnetic fields and turbulence in the interstellar medium, and provide a complete survey of nearby star-forming regions in the Southern hemisphere."