Friday 5th September 2025 Flip it and reverse it: probing the origins of oblique planetary systems

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Dr Claire Davies, University of Exeter

Friday 5th September 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom

The image shows a star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. Accredited to NASA.

The field of exoplanet detection and characterisation has bloomed over the past couple of decades and a wide variety of systems have been discovered, often widely different from our own. These have presented challenges to our understanding of how stars and their planetary systems formed, which were based on our neatly configured Solar System, where the planetary orbits align with the Sun’s equator. In this talk, I’ll present an overview of theoretical predictions of how planetary systems can become misaligned, as well as observational evidence that suggests a planet’s skew-whiff axis may originate from warps and tears in its natal proto-planetary disc.

Dr Claire Davies is a Senior Lecturer in Physics and Astronomy and Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion for the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Exeter. She obtained a PhD in Astronomy from the University of St Andrews in 2015 and has a research background in high angular resolution observational studies of star formation. Claire is an outspoken advocate for supporting under-represented groups into science through outreach and equality, diversity and inclusion work. She founded and leads the PRISM Exeter network and has worked with the likes of the BBC and Disney Pixar on The Sky At Night Question Time Special 2023 and science exhibitions to mark the release of the 2022 film “Lightyear”, respectively.

Tickets (£6 or £3 for BRLSI or Herschel Society members and students, proceeds to the BRLSI) available here.

Herschel Society Members receive a discount code in the announcement that is mailed to them.

Friday 3rd October 2025 Tycho Brahe and the Restoration of Astronomy

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Dr Emma Perkins


This Wikimedia image is of a mural showing Tycho Brahe taking celestial measurements in a Quadrant, and is from the Danish Royal Library.


From his island observatory funded by the Danish king, astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) conducted a systematic programme of observation that would lay the foundations for significant astronomical innovations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet while his empirical approach resonates with modern scientific sensibilities, Tycho’s view was retrospective: he aimed at no less than the restoration of astronomy. In this he was inspired, like many of his Renaissance counterparts, by the example of the ancient world. This lecture will explore the ways in which Tycho looked to the past to inform his own practices, which were themselves motivated by contemporary debates within the discipline of astronomy. .

Dr Emma Perkins, University of Cambridge

Emma Perkins is a Teaching Associate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and a Fellow of Newnham College at the University of Cambridge. Her main interests are in early modern astronomy, especially its visual and material culture and systems of patronage.

Tickets (£6 or £3 for BRLSI or Herschel Society members and students, proceeds to the BRLSI) available here shortly.

Herschel Society Members receive a discount code in the announcement that is mailed to them.

Friday 5th December 2025 Thomas Harriot, Renaissance Astronomer, Navigator and Mathematician

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Anthony Symes, Herschel Society

Friday 5th September 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom

The image is a portrait, supposedly be of Thomas Harriot, which is at Trinity College, Oxford.

Thomas Harriot was not only the first in England to be documented as pointing a telescope at the night sky and draw the Moon (just before Galileo in Venice) but was also a navigator who had sailed to North America to set up the first English colony at Roanoke Island, had learnt the Carolina Algonquian language and had written a book about what he found: A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Later he went on to make a study of sunspots, and he left numerous manuscripts which paved the way forward to Newton in Mathematics and Optics.

When a portion of court intrigue and Harriot’s connections with other key Elizabethan and Jacobean figures is added in, the result is a story which needs to be told.

Tony Symes is keen, as an enthusiastic amateur, to talk about this all too often forgotten scientist and reveal the background against which he was operating.

This is our second contribution to the 2025-26 BRLSI Renaissance theme.

Anthony Symes CEng is a committee member of the Herschel Society and chairs the Programme Subcommittee at the BRLSI. He graduated in Physics at the University of Sussex and worked in IT, mainly on supervisory control systems.

Friday 2nd May 2025 The Chemistry of the Universe

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The Davy lecture (The Royal Society of Chemistry)

Professor Mike G. Edmunds

Friday 2nd May 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom

The infrared image of the Eagle Nebula was obtained using JWST. Stars are born inside the dense, blue-gray “pillars of creation” – vast clouds of dense interstellar gas and dust. Accredited to NASA.


There is the real and fascinating probability that in the future we will be confronted with extraterrestrial worlds whose physical conditions and compositions result in chemistries radically different from our own. This is the Humphry Davy Lecture, first given at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London last autumn.  It outlines our current knowledge of the origin and distribution of the elements in the universe, as we try to push as far as we can into astronomical environments where complex chemistry is taking place. Currently we believe we have a remarkably good understanding of the processes and astronomical sites that have led to the formation of the elements in the periodic table. Except for hydrogen, some helium and a little lithium, all of them have been synthesised since the beginning of the universe. Recent spectroscopic observations to high redshifts are enabling us to follow their build up in galaxies from back in the earliest times to the present. The discovery of many planetary systems beyond the Solar System, and the investigation of dense interstellar environments, imply a huge unexplored range of chemical possibilities and may lead to profound implications for life in the Universe. It is suggested that extensive theoretical investigation of these enticing possibilities may be both possible and necessary.


Mike Edmunds is Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics at Cardiff University, and the immediate past-President of the Royal Astronomical Society.  He was educated at Cambridge, but has lived and worked in Wales for fifty years. His research career involved the determination and interpretation of the abundances of the chemical elements in the Universe – particularly through spectroscopy of galaxies – and investigation of the origin of interstellar dust. Later work has been in the history of astronomy, including the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism. He was a member of two UK Research Councils. He is a Vice-President of the Herschel Society and an Honorary Vice-President of the Society for the History of Astronomy. He can occasionally be seen in his one-man play about Newton – ‘Sir Isaac Remembers…’. He was the subject of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Life Scientific’ in April 2024, also appearing on “In Our Time” in November.

Tickets (£6 or £3 for BRLSI or Herschel Society members and students, proceeds to the BRLSI) available here.

Herschel Society Members receive a discount code in the announcement that is mailed to them.