NASA

Friday 7th May 2021 at 7.30 pm on Zoom

The Search for Advanced Extraterrestrial Civilisations via Anomalies in Astronomical Survey Data

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Prof. Michael (Mike) Garrett
University of Manchester
Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics

Image credit: NASA

Energy-intensive civilisations are likely to have a significant impact on both their local and extended environments – we already see evidence for this here on Earth. Advanced technical civilisations may reveal themselves to other civilisations by introducing anomalous signals into astronomical data. Artificial radio signals are perhaps the best known example but there are also many other possibilities e.g. excess infra-red emission due to waste heat losses. I will present a non-exhaustive description of some of the main anomalies or “techno-signatures” that astronomers around the world are currently seeking, with a focus on the recent work being conducted at Manchester and the Breakthrough Listen initiative (BLI). BLI has recently produced its first candidate signal – BLC1 – I will  discuss this new development and the future role long-baseline interferometry can play in follow-up observations and future surveys. I will also talk about the need for astronomers to broaden our horizons – to open up our minds to new possibilities and concede that there is a lot about the Universe we do not understand. As the universe continues to evolve for billions of years to come, we speculate on whether other, non-biological forms of intelligence and consciousness, may be out there awaiting discovery.

Biography of the speaker

Prof. Michael (Mike) Garrett is the inaugural Sir Bernard Lovell Chair of Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, and Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/michael.garrett.html). He is a former director of JIVE (2003-2007) and Director General of ASTRON (2007-2016) in the Netherlands. He did his first degree at the University of Glasgow (1986) and received a Ph.D. from Manchester in 1990. 

As General Director of ASTRON, Garrett was responsible for the final design, construction, commissioning, and operational phase of the 150M€ LOFAR telescope.  He also helped define the design of the Square Kilometre Array telescope, and previously coordinated several large European projects (EXPReS, RadioNet, and ASTERICS). Garrett’s scientific interests range from studies of compact cosmic objects in our own Galaxy to investigations of high-redshift systems in the early Universe. 

Garrett has a significant interest in SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) and related public outreach activities. He is currently co-chair of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) SETI Permanent Committee, and serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of the SETI Institute and Breakthrough Listen Initiative. In 2018, he developed a new multi-disciplinary course at the University of Manchester – Are we Alone? The course regularly attracts 150 students/yr.

The recording of this lecture is now freely available on the Virtual BRLSI YouTube channel. Please go the following link to view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R99qCO9QcSk.

Friday 9th April 2021 at 7.30pm on Zoom,

Hipparcos and Gaia: space astrometry — unravelling the formation and evolution of our Galaxy

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Dr Michael Perryman

Image credit: ESA–D. Ducros, 2013

The Hipparcos satellite project of the European Space Agency was dedicated to measuring the accurate positions of more than 100,000 stars. Doing so from space represented a fundamentally new discipline in space science. With the publication of the scientific results from the Hipparcos mission in 1997, ESA adopted the Gaia mission, a follow-on and vastly more advanced star-mapping satellite, in 2000. Gaia was launched in 2013 and continues to operate from its advantageous location at the Sun-Earth Lagrange point, L2. Gaia is measuring the positions of more than two billion stars in our Galaxy with extreme accuracy, and is set to revolutionise many areas of astronomy and astrophysics. The talk will explain why the measurement of star positions is of such scientific importance. It will review the two thousand year history of this branch of astronomy, called astrometry, explain why these measurements are being made from space, illustrate how the very exacting measurements are made in practice, and present some of the many areas of astronomy that are being impacted by these new experimental insights.

Michael Perryman obtained a degree in physics, and a PhD in radio astronomy, at Cambridge University. During a 30-year career with the European Space Agency, he was the scientific leader of the Hipparcos mission between 1981-1997, also serving as project manager during its operational phase, 1989-1993. He was the co-originator of the Gaia satellite mission, and ESA’s project scientist from its earliest concepts in 1995 until the Critical Design Review in 2008, establishing the instrument concept, technical feasibility, operational and data analysis principles, its organisational structure, and coordinating its scientific case. He was Professor of Astronomy at Leiden University, The Netherlands, between 1993-2009, and has received various awards for his leadership of space astrometry, including the Gold Medal of the French Astronomical Society, the Academy Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the Tycho Brahe Prize of the European Astronomical Society. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Lund University in Sweden in 2010, and was the Bohdan Paczynski Visiting Professor, Princeton University, in 2013.

The recording of this lecture is now freely available on the Virtual BRLSI YouTube channel. Please go the following link to view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2hbITqu6a0

Friday 5th March at 7.30 pm on Zoom

NASA’s Juno Mission to Jupiter

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Dr. Fran Bagenal
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics
University of Colorado, Boulder

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Juno’s principal goal is to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Underneath its dense cloud cover, Jupiter safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our solar system during its formation. As our primary example of a giant planet, Jupiter can also provide critical knowledge for understanding the planetary systems being discovered around other stars. With its suite of science instruments, Juno is investigating the interior structure, mapping Jupiter’s intense magnetic field, measuring the distribution of water and ammonia in the deep atmosphere. JUNO is also the first spacecraft to fly over Jupiter’s aurora and measuring both the energetic particles raining down on the planet and the bright “northern & southern lights” they excite. A huge bonus is the small public outreach camera that is taking fantastic images of Jupiter’s beautiful clouds. The images – some science, some art – are processed and shared by the public around the world. NASA’s JUNO mission was launched in August 2011 and has been in orbit over Jupiter’s poles since 4th July 2016.

Dr. Fran Bagenal is a research scientist and professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and is co-investigator and team leader of the plasma investigations on NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Juno mission to Jupiter. Her main area of expertise is the study of charged particles trapped in planetary magnetic fields and the interaction of plasmas with the atmospheres of planetary objects, particularly in the outer solar system. She edited the monograph Jupiter: Planet, Satellites and Magnetosphere (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Born and raised in the UK, Dr. Bagenal received her bachelor degree in Physics and Geophysics from the University of Lancaster, England, and her doctorate degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT (Cambridge, Mass) in 1981. She spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College, London, before returning to the United States for research and faculty positions in Boulder, Colorado. She has participated in several of NASA’s planetary exploration missions, including Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno.

The recording of this lecture is now freely available on the Virtual BRLSI YouTube channel. Please go the following link to view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7vMZTBEeQg

ESO/APEX & MSX/IPAC/NASA

Friday 5th February 2021 at 7.30 pm on Zoom,

The Looking Glass Universe – From Baryogenesis to Biogenesis

Is there a connection between the excess of matter over antimatter and handedness in biology?

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Roger Blandford (KIPAC, Stanford University)

Image credit: ESO/APEX & MSX/IPAC/NASA and A.Symes

The laws of physics were long thought to be unchanged when viewed in a mirror.
We have known for over sixty years that they are not.
As Sakharov first explained, this asymmetry, in action during the first moments of the universe, may account for the prevalence of matter over antimatter today.
Likewise, as Pasteur first showed, the laws of biology are similarly asymmetric, as is exhibited by the structure of DNA.
In this talk I will discuss how there might be a causal connection between these two qualities, mediated by cosmic rays.
On the way, I will illustrate this uneven-handedness using recent, exciting, astronomical discoveries, involving black holes, neutron stars and exoplanets.

Roger Blandford took his BA, MA and PhD degrees at Cambridge University. Following postdoctoral research at Cambridge, Princeton and Berkeley he took up a faculty position at Caltech in 1976 where he was appointed as the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics in 1989. In 2003 He moved to Stanford University to become the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) and the Luke Blossom Chair in the School of Humanities and Science. His research interests include black hole astrophysics, cosmology, gravitational lensing, cosmic ray physics and compact stars. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2008-2010, he chaired a two year National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He was awarded the 1998 Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the 2013 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the 2016 Crafoord Prize for Astronomy and the 2020 Shaw Prize for Astronomy.

The recording of this lecture is now freely available on the Virtual BRLSI YouTube channel. Please go the following link to view. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjfjZQczmX8

ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray)

Wednesday 18th November at 7.00 pm on MS Teams, Caroline Herschel Prize Lecture, Supermassive Black Holes – the Ultimate Galaxy Killers?

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Image credit: ESO/WFI (Optical); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (Submillimetre); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray)

The talk is being run by the University of Bath in conjunction with the Herschel Society and the Royal Astronomical Society.

There are over one billion galaxies in the Universe, each home to over a billion stars and one central supermassive black hole weighing in at up to a billion times the mass of the Sun. Theoretical astrophysicists think that these supermassive black holes can either heat or remove the cold hydrogen gas within a galaxy needed to form new stars through a huge outburst of energy. This process has to occur in computer simulated universes to stop galaxies evolving and growing too large. However, the big problem is that astronomers have never actually observed this process happening in our Universe.

This talk will focus on the research of astrophysicists trying to understand the conflict between observations of galaxies and their supermassive black holes and the current best model of the Universe. In particular Dr. Smethurst will highlight the work being done by the MaNGA survey team who are attempting to map the insides of over 10,000 galaxies in order to solve this long-standing problem.

Dr Becky Smethurst is an astrophysics research fellow at Christ Church at the University of Oxford working with the innovative data provided by the SDSS MaNGA survey to determine the effects of supermassive black holes on their host galaxies. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Oxford, using the public’s classifications of the shapes of galaxies from the online citizen science project Galaxy Zoo in her thesis on galaxy evolution. She then had a research fellowship at the University of Nottingham where she also started presenting videos for the science YouTube channels Sixty Symbols and Deep Sky Objects.

A slightly edited recording of this lecture is available on the following link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEFwrkZzd4A&t=248s

Friday 6th November 2020 at 7.30 pm on Zoom, Dr Bob Fosbury, How the Sun Paints the Sky (video recording and extended paper)

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Unless they are astronauts, humans must view the Universe through the window of the Earth’s atmosphere. Although a clear sky is relatively transparent to visible light, bright astronomical objects — most noticeably the Sun — can paint the entire sky with luminosity, colour and shadow to be captured by both landscape painters and photographers. How does this happen and what physical processes are responsible for these beautiful colours, gradations and patterns? The talk explains some of this and is illustrated with spectacular images of the sky from space and from above the European observatories in the Chilean Atacama desert.

Robert (Bob) Fosbury is currently an emeritus astronomer at the European Southern Observatory and an honorary professor at the Institute of Ophthalmology at UCL.

The video recording of this lecture is now freely available on the Virtual BRLSI YouTube channel. Please go the following link to view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9v9pFluF-M

There is also an extended paper on this subject as a PDF file here.

Friday 2nd October 2020 at 7.30 pm on Zoom, John I. Davies, Joint BIS/HS lecture – First Steps to Interstellar Probes- i4is Project Glowworm

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The lecture will explain i4is Project Glowworm – a near term low earth orbit demonstration of laser push technology. This is a first step to interstellar probes using that technology. The lecture will explain the motivation for this project, set out the history of, and physical basis for, laser propulsion, summarise the alternative means of interstellar propulsion, outline the planning for the probe and mention some other i4is work including Project Lyra, planning probes to reach interstellar objects such as 1I/’Oumuamua.

The lecture will be given by John I. Davies of the Initiative & Institute for Interstellar Studies (i4is).

The recording of this lecture is now freely available on the Virtual BRLSI YouTube channel. Please go the following link to view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWGh_4l0CCs

Friday 4th September 2020 at 7.30 pm on Zoom, Dr Dirk Froebrich, The HOYS-CAPS Project – Hunting Outbursting Young Stars

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The talk will introduce the Hunting Outbursting Young Stars (HOYS) citizen science project. They work with amateur astronomers to study the formation of stars and planets. We will give a brief overview on how stars and planets are forming and discuss how the project relies almost exclusively on data taken by Amateur Astronomers. The second half of the talk will be used to show some of the interesting results they have obtained. The lecturer will also briefly explain how people can participate in the data collection and data analysis.

Dr Dirk Froebrich is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, School of Physical Sciences, University of Kent

The recording of this lecture is now freely available on the Virtual BRLSI YouTube channel. Please go the following link to view.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsNLyRRv57U&t=3s

Friday 6th March 2020, Professor Michael G. Edmunds – Astronomy in an Age of Revolutions: The Foundation and Founders of the Royal Astronomical Society 1820

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Two hundred years ago on a cold winter’s night in January, fourteen men sat down to dinner at the Freemasons’ Tavern in London. They agreed to form the Astronomical Society of London – which would become the Royal Astronomical Society in 1831.  What sort of men were they? What were they hoping to achieve?  In this bicentenary year the talk will look at these colourful characters – some famous, some less well known – with a few others from the early membership, and ask:  what was known about the Universe at that time?