Events on Friday, February 20th, 2026
- Black and Brown in Physics
- BBiP Black History Heritage Month Celebration
- Time: 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
- Place: Chamberlin 2241
- Speaker: Taylor Bailey, Center for Campus History
- Abstract: The Black and Brown in Physics (BBiP) student organization would like to invite you to our upcoming Black History Heritage Month Celebration next Friday, February 20th at 1 PM in Chamberlin 2241.
We have the privilege of again inviting Taylor Bailey, Assistant Director for the Center of Campus History, whose research focuses on how marginalized people (specifically Black women), navigate life, liberation, and kinship through Black feminist thought, literary criticisms, 20th century literature, and Black cultural studies. Bailey's presentation will be on "The History of Blackface and Minstrelsy at UW-Madison".
In addition to the talk, we will also be catering lunch from Les Delices de Awa, a local restaurant that serves authentic West African food.
We will be broadcasting the talk over Zoom as well for those of you interested in joining the presentation remotely.
Zoom link:
We hope that you can join us in celebrating Black History Month! - Physics Department Colloquium
- Dense matter and neutron stars: what we have learned from NICER
- Time: 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
- Place: Chamberlin 2241
- Speaker: M. Coleman Miller, University of Maryland
- Abstract: Precise and reliable measurements of neutron star radii and other properties are essential to our understanding of cold, catalyzed matter beyond nuclear saturation density. Over the last fifteen years, measurements of high-mass neutron stars, gravitational waves from the double neutron star merger GW170817, and X-ray observations have dramatically improved our understanding of neutron star structure. In particular, NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) satellite has provided high-quality data sets that have yielded published measurements of the mass and radius of several neutron stars. I will discuss our group's analyses of these pulsars and will in particular discuss our assumptions and potential systematic errors, to help in the assessment of our work. I will also discuss the implications of our results, combined with other observations, for the properties of the dense matter in the cores of neutron stars.
- Host: Zach Curtis-Ginsberg