“The Missing Part of the Universe” is the title of the featured presentation scheduled Monday, Aug. 31 when the Hayward Rotary Club meets for lunch at 1074 B St. The speaker will be Seth Shostak senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, where he leads the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
In the 1970s, astronomers were using radio telescopes to map out hydrogen gas in some nearby galaxies. To their surprise, this gas was spinning around the centers of the galaxies far more quickly than anticipated. Eventually, the researchers had to come to grips with the fact that invisible stuff permeated the universe—stuff that wasn’t planets, stars, or anything else they knew about. It was dubbed “missing mass,” and it is still one of the greatest puzzles about the cosmos. In his talk,Seth Shostak will describe his role in finding that something massive, important, and invisible exists in the cosmos.