Friday 5th April 7.30pm at the BRLSI. Professor Mark Birkinshaw. “Variety in Astronomical Orbits.”

Variety in astronomical orbits

Gravitation dominates the dynamics of the Universe on scales larger than a few kilometres, and so orbital motion is the basic motion of bodies in the Universe. The variety of orbital motions is much wider than the set of elliptical shapes that are used as an approximation in the Solar System. In this lecture I will extend the concept or orbital motion into more general classes of orbits, such as those around rotating black holes.

Mark Birkinshaw

… is the William P. Coldrick Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Bristol, and also holds visiting appointments with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Chalmers University. He is well-known for work on jets from active galaxies, structures in the microwave background radiation, and perturbation theory in jet physics and general relativity.