Events

Wayfinding Under Blackfoot Skies is a new project at the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory. This project involves the development of scientific based programs that investigate and explore Indigenous methods of celestial observation and the practical articulation of navigating by the stars. The core themes for the Wayfinding under Blackfoot Skies programs are a joining of Indigenous and Western science ideologies. I will talk about my research and how the observatory is working towards blending traditional knowledge into our programming and exhibits.

²²⁵Ac is an alpha-emitting radionuclide that has shown remarkable potential for use in targeted alpha therapy of late stage metastatic diseases, most notably prostate cancer. However, ²²⁵Ac-radiopharmaceutical development remains limited by the insufficient availability of the radionuclide, despite multiple efforts to increase ²²⁵Ac supply via alternative methods that avoid the use of nuclear weapons material.

The discovery of billion solar mass quasars at redshifts of 6–7 challenges our understanding of the early Universe; how did such massive objects form in the first billion years? Observational constraints and numerical simulations increasingly favour the "direct collapse" scenario. In this case, an atomically-cooled halo of primordial composition accretes rapidly onto a single protostellar core, ultimately collapsing through the Chandrasekhar-Feynman instability to produce a supermassive (~100,000 solar mass) "seed" black hole.