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© 2026 Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures
Description
Listen to exciting, non-technical talks on some of the most interesting developments in astronomy and space science. Founded in 1999, the Silicon Valley Astronomy Lectures are presented on six Wednesday evenings during each school year at Foothill College, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley. Speakers include a wide range of noted scientists, explaining astronomical developments in everyday language. The series is organized and moderated by Foothill's astronomy instructor emeritus Andrew Fraknoi and jointly sponsored by the Foothill College Physical Science, Math, and Engineering Division, the SETI Institute, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and the University of California Observatories (including the Lick Observatory.)
60 Episodes
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May 20, 2026 Dr, Hakeem Oluseyi (CEO, Astronomical Society of the Pacific) n his new book, Why Do We Exist, Dr. Oluseyi suggests that the story of our existence can be told as a passage through nine interwoven realms—each revealing a new layer of cosmic information. In this public talk, he introduces each of the realms, but then focuses on cosmic connections to the Middle Realm, where we humans live, and to the Realm of Life, where organisms flourish across the vastness of space. He explores ...
Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, Apr. 8, 2026. The NASA Psyche mission is on its way to orbit a small but immensely ancient world in our asteroid belt: A metallic object, the first humans will ever have visited. When our solar system was in its infancy, thousands of planetesimals (tiny planet-like objects) formed in less than a million years. Many planetesimals later melted, allowing metal cores to form inside rocky mantles. One of ...
A nontechnical talk by Dr. Bruce Macintosh (University of California Observatories) Mar. 11, 2026 In the past three decades, more than 6000 planets have been discovered orbiting other stars. Advances in technology have allowed a handful of giant planets around other stars to be imaged directly. Dr. Macintosh tells us about the first-ever images of other solar systems — and the technology that has allowed us to discover them, such as the Gemini Planet Imager — as well as the future plane...
A nontechnical talk by Dr. Robert Kirshner, Jan 28, 2026. One hundred years ago, Edwin Hubble showed that the universe is expanding. In the 1990s, astronomers found that the expansion is not slowing down, as expected, but speeding up. This led to a Nobel Prize in Physics (for our speaker's students) and a consensus that we live in a universe that is made up of invisible dark matter, mysterious dark energy, and only a pinch of the atoms we, and everything we can see in the Universe, are made o...
Dr. Alfonso Davila (NASA Ames Research Center) Nov. 24, 2025 In 2005, NASA's Cassini spacecraft made a groundbreaking discovery—it found massive plumes of ice and gas erupting from the south pole of Enceladus, a small but geologically-active moon of Saturn. These plumes are now believed to originate from a subsurface ocean of liquid water beneath the moon’s icy crust, with conditions compatible with life, as we know it. The talk focuses on our current understanding of Enceladus' plume and sub...
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