Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Monday 19th AM)
2021 RAS Gold Medal Awardee
Caroline Herschel in Bath and women in astronomy in today
Caroline Herschel (an RAS Gold medallist) lived in Bath 1772 to 1782 and saw the discovery of Uranus. I will outline her career, noting her roles and her contributions to astronomy. In the second half of this talk I will discuss the position of women in astronomy today in the UK and elsewhere. (YouTube Recording)
Prof Stephon Alexander (Monday 19th PM)
The Jazz of Physics: The link between music and the structure of the Universe
In this talk Alexander revisits the interconnection between the music and the evolution of astrophysics and the laws of motion. He explores new ways music, in particular jazz music, mirrors modern physics, such as quantum mechanics, general relatively, and the physics of the early universe. Finally, he discusses ways that innovations in physics have been and can be inspired from “improvisational logic” exemplified in Jazz performance and practice. (YouTube Recording)
Prof Yvonne Elsworth (Tuesday 20th AM)
2020 RAS Gold Medal Awardee
The benefits of a slow steady heart beat
When I first moved to Birmingham in the mid-1980s the field of Helioseismology (the study of the natural resonances of the Sun) was in its infancy. The data were initially contested by some who believed that the claim to measure stellar radial velocities in the cm/sec when the norm was km/sec just could not be right. Move forward to current times to discover that we (and others) have used these data to gain huge understanding of the interior of the Sun and furthermore have extended the investigations to many tens of thousands of stars that are like the current Sun or like the Sun will be in the distant future. As with all advances, progress brings new challenges, new questions. That is the delight of science......and all this follows from the regular beat of the natural oscillations of stars.
I will outline some of the aspects of the projects with which I have been involved and for which I was awarded the 2020 Gold Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society. (YouTube Recording)
Prof Victoria Kaspi (Tuesday 20th PM)
Fast Radio Bursts or Why I Finally Left the Galaxy
Victoria Kaspi will first give an overview of her research on neutron stars, and her contributions to our understanding of magnetars, which was was recently recognised in her award of the 2021 Shaw Prize in Astronomy. Subsequently, she will discuss Fast Radio Bursts, which are short (few millisecond) bursts of radio waves observed from cosmological distances. Their origin is presently unknown, yet their rate is many hundreds per sky per day, indicating a not-uncommon phenomenon in the Universe. In this talk, I will review the FRB field and present new results on FRBs from a new digital transit radio telescope, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). (YouTube Recording)
Dr Eoin Carley (Wednesday 21st AM)
The shocking radio sun: Observations of solar eruptive events in a new era of radio interferometry
The solar atmosphere regularly releases huge quantities of energy, resulting in the largest eruptions in the solar system. During these eruptions particles are accelerated to high energies, producing emission from gamma-rays to radio. The solar radio bursts in particular provide us with remarkable insight into the eruptive process and the associated particle acceleration phenomena, such as magnetic reconnection and shock waves. Radio instrumentation therefore enjoys a prominent role in observing the Sun and solar eruptive events, and has been providing observations of this activity since the mid 20th century. This long history of solar radio astronomy has entered a new era of observational techniques in the form of phased-array interferometry, such as that provided by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR). LOFAR is the world's largest and most powerful low frequency radio interferometer. When used to observe the Sun, it has provided unprecedented detail on the mechanisms of particle acceleration in the solar corona and the involvement of plasma instabilities and turbulence in producing the radio emission. In this talk I will review recent progress made on the observations of solar eruptive events using LOFAR. I will show how LOFAR has greatly improved upon knowledge of the radio Sun and its energy release processes, and is paving the way for further progress with the radio interferometers of the future. (YouTube Recording)
Prof Sandra Faber (Thursday 22nd PM)
2020 RAS Gold Medal Awardee
A Schematic Model for Black Hole Growth and Galaxy Quenching
Why star formation ends in galaxies is one of the major questions in astronomy. I will describe a semi-empirical model for the linkage between black hole mass, galaxy properties, and dark halo mass. While star-forming, galaxies build their stellar mass at a rate that is set by their dark halo mass but grow BHs at a rate that is set by their central stellar density. When total effective emitted BH energy exceeds 4x halo-gas binding energy, galaxies enter the "green valley" and begin to quench. The crossing point is clearly visible as the slanted boundary between star-forming galaxies and quenched galaxies in mass vs. radius and central stellar density. BH mass data then suggest that BH growth accelerates in the green valley and that >90% of BH growth takes place there. When fully quenched, galaxies stop evolving and come to a halt along the classic MBH ~ σ4 relation, which is offset by about a x10 higher in zero point than the BH scaling law for star-forming galaxies. This simple picture matches many important scaling laws for BHs and galaxies since z ~ 3. It portrays galaxy quenching as a contest between black holes and halos – halos build galaxies, which then build black holes, which then react back and quench their halos. (YouTube Recording)
Dr Nicolas Bonne (Friday 23rd AM)
The Tactile Universe: Accessible astrophysics public engagement with the vision impaired community
Astronomy is a topic that engages and inspires a wide range of audiences around the world, but blind and vision impaired people can often find it difficult to engage with the subject due to its very visual nature. The Tactile Universe is an award winning public engagement project based at the University of Portsmouth which is opening up current topics in astrophysics research to blind and vision impaired people through accessible resources. We will discuss the project’s main resource (3D printable tactile images of galaxies), what the project is doing to inspire young people with vision impairments to engage with topics in STEM, as well as outlining how the project has expanded across the UK and internationally through resource sharing and presenter training workshops. We’ll share how involving the vision impaired community in the development and delivery of the project has shaped the project and its resources in unique ways, and share the lessons the project team have learnt along the way. (YouTube Recording)
Prof Scott Tremaine (Friday 23rd PM)
2020 AAS Russell Lectureship Prize
Comets, unseen planets, and the outer fringes of the solar system
Comets have inspired awe since prehistoric times, but even today there are only a few thousand comets with well-determined orbits. Nevertheless, the analysis of this limited sample yields a compelling model for the formation, evolution and present distribution of comets. This model implies that the primary source of comets is the Oort cloud, containing over 100 billion comets at 5,000 to 100,000 times the Earth-Sun distance. I will review our current understanding of the history and structure of the Oort cloud, and what comets can tell us about possible undiscovered planets beyond Neptune. (YouTube Recording)
