“It’s More Than a Month,” A Part of Community Cinema Project

Sponsored by: African American & Africana Studies and KET

Date: Feb. 16

Time: Screening at 6 p.m., followed by reception

Location: ArtsPlace, 161 N. Mill Street in downtown Lexington

Description: Community Cinema is an outreach project that shows Independent Lens documentaries in the community and has a panel discussion following each film. It  shows a film every third Thursday of the month at Arts Place in downtown Lexington. The film for Feb. 16 is titled “More Than a Month” and it follows Shukree Hassan Tilghman, a 29-year-old African-American filmmaker, on a cross-country tongue-in-cheek campaign to end Black History Month. You can see the trailer here http://www.itvs.org/films/more-than-a-month.

Contact: Frank X Walker, fxw2@uky.edu, 859-257-1035

The Materials Research Society, UK Chapter, presents Dr Bruce Hinds of the UK Chemistry Department.

Find more details on the provided flyer.

Dear Colleagues and Students,

In celebration of its inaugural semester, the Chinese Studies program will hold a series of lectures during Spring term. The first lecture, entitled "Empire and Domestic Economy: Continuity and Change in Mongolia’s Bronze and Iron Age Archaeological Landscape" by Dr. Jean-Luc Houle of Western Kentucky University, will be held Friday, February 17, 1-2pm in 420 Patterson Office Tower. This lecture is co-sponsored by the Russian Studies program.

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Empire and Domestic Economy: Continuity and Change in Mongolia’s Bronze and Iron Age Archaeological Landscape

Professor Jean-Luc Houle, Western Kentucky University

The apex of political complexity among Inner Asian pastoralists was Chinggis Khan’s mighty empire of the 13th and 14th centuries, along with the earlier Xiongnu confederation (200 BCE to 200 CE). The Mongol Empire was the largest continuous land empire of all time, while the Xiongnu was extremely long-lived, dominating the entire eastern Eurasian steppe from the end of the third century BCE through the middle of the first century CE, and surviving as a minor power into the fourth century. What was it that led to the success of these great polities? Are there lessons to be learned?

Archaeology as a discipline is uniquely suited to examining social change over time from varying perspectives. However, the diachronic study of prehistoric mobile pastoralist societies in the Eurasian Steppes and the development of societal complexity among such groups have been mostly limited to documenting change at the macro-level. This presentation will discuss how social change manifests itself at different scales. As a window into the past, I will explore this through the transformation of the archaeological landscape in central Mongolia from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age period when the first state-like nomadic polity, the Xiongnu, appeared on the Eurasian steppes.

In doing so, this presentation will address an important question in the anthropological literature on nomadic pastoralism, that is, the impact of major economic and social changes on nomadic society and pastoral subsistence—a question still very pertinent today in various world regions. 

Testing the Cold Dark Matter Paradigm for Structure Formation from Dwarf Galaxy to Galaxy Cluster Scales                                                                     

                                                Department of Physics and Astronomy

                                                                  UC Santa Barbara

The Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm of structure formation has been extremely successful in explaining the large scale properties of the universe, but struggles on smaller scales where baryonic physics can dominate.  In particular, two 'problems' with the CDM paradigm have been identified: 1) the observed deficit in the number of low mass satellites around the Milky Way and 2) the flat, cored inner dark matter density profiles seen in some galaxy and cluster centers, contrary to the universally 'cuspy' halos seen in simulations.  While these 'problems' are not likely to be the death knell of CDM, they do represent an opportunity to study how baryonic physics effect the distribution of dark matter.

I will discuss two observational programs aimed at better understanding the two 'problems' associated with CDM.  First, I will present measurements of the dark matter density profile in galaxy clusters utilizing a combination of gravitational lensing and galaxy dynamics to measure the mass at different scales.  Additionally, I will present results from our imaging survey to measure the structure and star formation history of the newly discovered ultrafaint Milky Way satellites, a prerequisite for understanding how stars populate the smallest dark matter halos. In both cases, I will lay out immediate and longer term plans for observationally characterizing the relationship between dark matter and baryons. 

Time Crystals

We consider the possibility that classical or semi-classical dynamical systems display motion in their lowest energy state, forming a time analogue of crystalline spatial order.

The Universe in a Box: Modeling Galaxies and the Cosmic Web

 Brian O’Shea

Department of Physics & Astronomy

 Michigan State University

 (Refreshments at 3:00pm)

ABSTRACT:   Galaxies are the building blocks of the universe.  Understanding their formation, evolution, and appearance is important to answering fundamental questions about our origins, the universe we live in, and our future.  Since it is impossible to build a galaxy in the laboratory, we must use computers to model these objects.  However, galaxies are complex systems whose behavior relies on a wide range of physical processes operating over a large range of spatial and temporal scales, which presents challenges to the thoughtful astrophysicist.  In this talk, I will discuss the tools and techniques used to model galaxies, and will also present the results of my research group's recent efforts to understand these fascinating objects.  Results from our group's scientific visualization efforts will be shown as well.