Iman Behbehani – The Life Cycle of Matter through Stars
DUE TO THE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN, THE LECTURE WITH NAVEEN VETCHA HAS BEEN MOVED TO JANUARY 20TH, 2026
WE ARE PLEASED TO WELCOME IMAN BEHBEHANI
Join us LIVE online for this lecture. This event will be live-streamed on YouTube and as a webinar on Zoom, but we’d love to see you in person in the classroom at the Westport Observatory. As always, the talk will be posted to the Westport Astronomical Society’s YouTube channel afterwards.
Our scheduled lecture suddenly fell victim to the government shutdown! Fortunately, Iman Behbehani has graciously stepped in to fill the void! Iman recently earned her Master’s in Astrophysics investigating mass loss in massive stars, the very process that inspired Carl Sagan’s famous quote, ‘We are made of star stuff.” Iman is dedicated to innovative science education as a planetarium instructor, producer of Astronomy on Tap, and co-creator of Science, Tonight!, featured in the New York Comedy Festival. Iman enjoys stiff dancing, poorly written TV shows, and getting calls from the library about overdue books.
“Massive stars form carbon, oxygen, iron, and all of the elements that compose us and make our lives possible. They redistribute these elements back into the universe through mass loss and supernovae. New stars, including our sun, form from clouds of gas and dust left behind by other stars, continuing the life cycle of matter. We can observe mass loss in modern massive stars, like the red supergiant Betelgeuse. Ejecta can accumulate in a cloud of dust and gas known as the circumstellar material. I shall present my research approximating the density distribution of Betelgeuse’s surrounding material, and how circumstellar material impacts supernova explosions.”
