Note: Presenting via Zoom as part of the Smithsonian Associates program.

The universe is far stranger than science fiction ... and it’s all real. Kimberly Arcand of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory leads a journey through weird and wild places in the cosmos, from merely mind-bending to truly extreme. Along the way meet blazars (hyperactive, distant black holes) that outshine entire galaxies, quasars powered by supermassive black holes, city-sized neutron stars, and pulsars that keep time more precisely than atomic clocks, plus a few truly wild worlds orbiting distant suns. Arcand talks about how these extreme objects are found and what they reveal about the cosmos.