Symposium on black holes to be held in honor of Chandrasekhar

"Black Holes and Relativistic Stars," a symposium honoring the memory of University astrophysicist and Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, will be held on campus on Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 14 and 15. Chandrasekhar, who died at age 84 in 1995, devoted most of the last 30 years of his scientific career to research on the theory of black holes and relativistic stars.

Chandrasekhar, a University faculty member for nearly 60 years, was the Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Astronomy & Astrophysics, Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute. During his career, Chandrasekhar made fundamental contributions across the entire range of theoretical astrophysics. At the age of 19, he developed the theory about the nature of stars for which he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics 53 years later, in 1983.

The symposium will consist of two full days of plenary talks, as well as a Friday evening welcoming reception and a Saturday evening banquet. The organizing committee for the symposium is chaired by Robert Wald, Professor in Physics, who also will be among the plenary speakers. The other speakers are Valeria Ferrari, University of Rome; John Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; James Hartle, University of California-Santa Barbara; Stephen Hawking, Cambridge; Werner Israel, University of Alberta; Roger Penrose, Oxford; Martin Rees, Cambridge; Rafael Sorkin, Syracuse University; Saul Teukolsky, Cornell; Kip Thorne, Caltech; and Edward Witten, Institute for Advanced Study.

More information is available at http://rainbow.uchicago.edu/relativity.

To register for the symposium, contact Judith Spurgin in the Office of Special Events at 7028369.