https://astronomyontap.org/locations/madison-wi/

Astronomy on Tap Madison, Madison, WI (2026)

05/19/2026

AOT IS TOMORROW🔥🔥🔥 This month is a very special event! Coinciding with Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) we have three speakers from all over giving public talks for Astronomy on Tap Madison! Join us on WEDNESDAY May 20th at 7pm hosted by and hear our final speaker Prof. Raymond Pierrehumbert give his talk "The Joy of Uninhabitable Worlds"

Most of the exoplanets we can observe and characterize are uninhabitable for life as we know it, some of them wildly uninhabitable. Nonetheless, we can learn a great deal about planets and the prospect for habitability from these cases of failed habitability. I’ll give a tour of some of my favourite uninhabitable worlds – lava planets where it snows beach sand and liquid sodium, subNeptunes with supercritical water layers or magma oceans, a multitude of bare rockballs, and (more conventionally Venus analogues which have undergone a runaway greenhouse. So far, no Venus analogues have been detected, but moving forward into future observational platforms, their study will provide valuable insights into “What could possibly go wrong?”

Ray Pierrehumbert is a Professor of Planetary Physics at Oxford University and Professor of the Practice at MIT/Earth Atmosphere and Planetary Sciences. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and holder of the Cassini Medal. Lead author on IPCC Third Assessment Report. In his free time he is a dedicated melodeon player for Scandi, Balfolk, Trad French and Scottish music.

05/18/2026

AOT IS IN 2 DAYS 🔥🔥🔥 This month is a very special event! Coinciding with Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) we have three speakers from all over giving public talks for Astronomy on Tap Madison! Join us on WEDNESDAY May 20th at 7pm hosted by and hear our second speaker Dr. Jacob Lustig-Yaeger give his talk "The Fate of Rocky Exoplanet Atmospheres and the Cosmic Shoreline"

The quest to find atmospheres on rocky exoplanets orbiting the very smallest of stars is underway with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). But the universe makes no promises that such planets even have atmospheres due to the harsh stellar environment in which they are found. In this talk, I’ll discuss how studying many worlds allows astronomers to gain profound insights into the formation and evolutionary processes that produce, sculpt, and erode atmospheres. In this quest, if some planets are found to have atmospheres, then we can study them in depth and, ultimately, search for signs of life. But if none do, then humanity’s search for life in the cosmos must pivot to different types of stars.

Jacob Lustig-Yaeger is a Senior Staff Scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrobiology from the University of Washington in 2020. Jacob uses space telescopes and super computers to study the atmospheres of distant exoplanets.

05/16/2026

AOT IS IN 4 DAYS 🔥🔥🔥 This month is a very special event! Coinciding with Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) we have three speakers from all over giving public talks for Astronomy on Tap Madison! Join us on WEDNESDAY May 20th at 7pm hosted by and hear our first speaker Aiden Zelakiewicz give his talk "Photographing Earth's Distant Relatives with the Habitable Worlds Observatory"

The question “Are we alone?” has captivated scientists and science fiction writers alike for generations. NASA’s next flagship-class astrophysics space telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), is humanity's most ambitious attempt yet to find out. HWO is designed to image planets like Earth around Sun-like stars and search their atmospheres for signs of life. In this talk, Aiden Zelakiewicz will discuss how HWO will hunt for signatures of life on distant Earth-like worlds.

Aiden Zelakiewicz is an Astronomy Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University and a researcher at the Carl Sagan Institute. His work focuses on predicting science yield with next-generation high-contrast imaging missions such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory.

05/11/2026

AOT IS IN 9 DAYS 🔥🔥🔥 This month is a very special event! Coinciding with next weeks Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) we have three speakers from all over giving public talks for Astronomy on Tap Madison! Aiden Zelakiewicz, Dr. Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, and Prof. Raymond Pierrehumbert will be giving talks covering everything you need to know about the current state of astrobiology 🦠🔭👀

This months event is May 20th at 7pm at hosted by . We hope to see you there!

04/21/2026

AOT is TOMORROW! Join us tonight at 7pm at 💁‍♀️This month we have visitors from giving their joint talk titled "Space Rocks and Stardust" 🌠 Meet their third speaker Laila Vleeschower!

As a child, I dreamed to venture into space as an astronaut. However, I later became fascinated with studying the night sky, leading me to pursue a career as an astrophysicist. In 2023, I completed my Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, and subsequently joined UWM as a postdoctoral researcher. My research focuses on searching and timing of pulsars under the NANOGrav project. Beyond physics, I enjoy cooking, practicing yoga, dancing, reading, and traveling.

04/20/2026

AOT IS TOMORROW!!!🌌🔭👀 Join us April 21st at 7pm at 💁‍♀️This month we have visitors from giving their joint talk titled "Space Rocks and Stardust" 🌠 Meet their second speaker Tamal RoyChowdhury!

I have always found the starry night sky to be intriguing. But my genuine interest in Astronomy sparked as an 11-year-old when I was gifted an encyclopedia on space. Going through it, I realized there is more to the night sky than just the dots of light that we see. Growing up I started to take an interest in Physics to know how things work. Hence, I pursued a bachelor’s and a master’s in Physics and decided to continue into research. I joined the graduate program at UWM in 2022 and my research interest is gravitational wave astronomy. Back when I was in school, I used to enjoy explaining to my friends’ the new things I read from different books on space. That stopped happening as I grew up. But maybe some part of me wants to do it again, hence I decided to join the Coffeeshop Astrophysics group. I like reading books and watching soccer in my spare time, and I’m also an avid gamer.

04/20/2026

AOT IS TOMORROW!!!🌌🔭👀 Join us April 21st at 7pm at 💁‍♀️This month we have visitors from giving their joint talk titled "Space Rocks and Stardust" 🌠 Meet their first speaker Pratyasha Gitika!

As a kid, I loved to stare at the night sky and watch aeroplanes sweep past what felt like gazillions of stars. In the final year of my undergraduate, I got a chance to explore the field of astronomy deeply and learn more about the structure and formation of tiny compact stars, named pulsars. This led me to pursue a PhD in using pulsars as probes to search for tiny ripples in spacetime, known as gravitational waves. Now I have joined the pulsar group at UW Milwaukee as a postdoctoral researcher. As a member of coffeeshop astrophysics, I am excited to share how incredible our Universe really is. Apart from research, I enjoy painting and exploring new places.

04/16/2026

AOT IS NEXT WEEK!!!🌌🔭👀 Join us next week on April 21st at 7pm at 💁‍♀️This month we have visitors from giving their joint talk titled "Space Rocks and Stardust" 🌠

We hope to see you there!

03/16/2026

AoT is TOMORROW 🪐🔭👀 Join us on St. Patricks day at hosted by and meet our second speaker this month Professor Susanna Widicus Weaver! She will be giving her talk titled "Do Stars and Planets Build the Chemical Ingredients for Life?"

Life on Earth displays a spectacular array of chemical complexity. Star forming regions and protoplanetary disks – the birthplaces of new solar systems – also contain numerous molecules that may eventually form the larger building blocks of life like we find on Earth. In her research, Susanna combines laboratory chemical studies with telescope observations to understand how the chemistry of life begins during star and planet formation. In this talk Susanna will overview our recent laboratory measurements of ice chemistry and compare those results to observations obtained with ground and space based telescopes.

Susanna Widicus Weaver is the Vozza Professor of Chemistry and Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Origins Research. She received her BS from Illinois Wesleyan University, her PhD from the California Institute of Technology, and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She began her career at Emory University in 2008 and moved to UW Madison in 2020. She uses a combination of laboratory spectroscopy, observational astronomy, and astrochemical modeling to study prebiotic chemistry during star and planet formation.

03/16/2026

AoT is in TWO DAYS 🪐🔭👀 Join us on St. Patricks day at hosted by and meet our first speaker this month Professor Bob Benjamin! He will be giving his talk titled "Plotting our Escape into the Milky Way"🌌

Have you ever looked out at the sky and wondered what it would be like to travel among the stars? Thanks to the European Space Agency mission Gaia we now have high precision distances to millions of stars in our section of the Milky Way, which has enabled a cascade of discoveries. Bob will share the story of astronomers’ efforts to map out the Milky Way, starting with a consequential love story in 1928 and ending with a recently published 3D fly-through of the stars and nebulae you can see with a back-yard telescope.

Bob Benjamin is professor emeritus of physics from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Over his thirty year career, which has focused on the physics of interstellar matter and the structure of our Milky Way Galaxy, he never imagined he would be doing the research he'll be sharing in this talk.

Astronomy on Tap Madison

05/19/2026

05/18/2026

05/16/2026

05/11/2026

04/21/2026

04/20/2026

04/20/2026

04/16/2026

03/16/2026

03/16/2026

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