Public Lecture: Galaxy Hunters

Professor Patricia Henning 

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of New Mexico

The radio telescope at Arecibo observatory, the world’s largest and most sensitive single antenna radio telescope, located in Puerto Rico.

Download the pdf flyer - including parking and location details. 

Professor Trish Henning is a Galaxy Hunter. She uses the largest radio telescope in the world to glimpse distant galaxies, which reveal the large-scale structure of the Universe. Why? Because evidence suggests that galaxies including our own Milky Way are being pulled around by the gravity of unknown - hidden - galaxies.

In this special guest lecture Professor Henning will describe her work with the 305 metre Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and her mission to seek out new galaxies and shed light on a Universal mystery.

About Trish Henning

After earning her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Maryland in 1990, Patricia Henning became a postdoctoral fellow at the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy in Dwingeloo, The Netherlands. From there, she joined the University of New Mexico faculty in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in 1993. She is currently an Associate Professor, and has been the director of the Institute for Astrophysics since 2000. Trained as a radio astronomer, Professor Henning focuses her research on the study of external galaxies. She is particularly interested in mapping the large-scale structure of the Universe where it lies hidden by our own Milky Way galaxy. Why does she work in such an obscure region? We have evidence that the Milky Way is being pulled around by hidden mass, which isn’t shown in maps of known galaxies. To date, she and her collaborators have catalogued over one thousand galaxies using radio telescopes in The Netherlands and Australia. She is continuing this survey work now using the world’s largest single dish radio telescope, in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. She is also currently serving as Vice Chair of the United States Square Kilometer Array Consortium, a group of scientists and engineers working with the global community toward the realization of the next-generation cm- and m-wave radio telescope, the Square Kilometer Array.

This lecture is co-sponsored with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and the Institute of Advanced Studies at UWA.