Speaker: Prof. Albert Kong (National Tsinghua University)

Time: 1:30pm, Friday (July 24,2009)

Location: Large conf. room, 3rd floor

Abstract:

It is widely recognized that temporal resolution is a relatively unexplored region of observational parameter space, particularly in the optical wavebands. The study of compact objects such as white dwarfs, neutron stars and stellar mass black holes benefits the most from high-speed observations. This is because the dynamical time-scales of compact objects range from seconds in white dwarfs to milliseconds in neutron stars and black holes, which means that the rotation and pulsation of these objects or material in the accretion disk tends to occur on time-scales of milliseconds to seconds. As a result, development of high-speed CCD camera with a frame rate of higher than 10 frame per second will significantly improve our understanding of compact objects. In this talk, I will introduce the scientific motivation of our ongoing UltraPhot project which is to build a wide-field high-speed camera for the Very Large Telescope.