Public TalksMonthly Talks on Astronomical Topics of Interest |  |
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Monthly Public Talks
Our popular monthly talks are for members and the public to learn about some aspects of astronomy. These talks are aimed at ‘middle of the road’ level so the talk will appeal to members of the public with no prior knowledge, newcomers as well as those who have been interested in the subject for a number of years.
Topics from imaging the night sky, through to Cosmology, we invite speakers from all over the UK and the World.
We make a small charge on the door of £3.00 to cover our expenses
Our local venue:
Clanfield Memorial Hall,
South Lane,
Clanfield
Waterlooville
Hampshire
PO8 0RB
If you wish to view this location on MultiMap please click here
All talks start at 7:45pm unless otherwise stated
Friday, 12th October 2018
Making a Solar System: A Recipe for Worlds
A talk by Dr Ashley King
Cost: £3 to non-members
Our Founder's memorial lecture this year will be delivered by Dr Ashley King, who is currently a post-doc research assistant at the Natural History Museum (since 2012) and a post-doc research scholar at the University of Chicago, US (since 2010) .
The solar system formed from a cloud of gas and dust around 4.5 billion years ago. Astronomical observations allow us to witness the birth of distant stars and planets, however the recipe for our own solar system is recorded in primitive extra-terrestrial materials. These include cometary samples returned by NASA's Stardust mission, or collected in the Earth's stratosphere as fluffy interplanetary dust particles, and meteorites ejected from the surfaces of asteroids.
Dr King will talk about how we are using cutting-edge analytical techniques to unlock the secrets of primitive extra-terrestrial materials, revealing details about the earliest conditions in the solar system and how the raw ingredients came together to form asteroids, comets and planets.
Friday, 9th November 2018
The Search for Life on Exoplanets
A talk by Dr Paul B Rimmer
Cost: £3 for non-members
Dr Rimmer is a Postdoc at University of Cambridge Cavendish Astrophysics Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
Are we alone in the universe? Is our galaxy teeming with
alien life, or is our small blue planet the lone island of life in an
otherwise dead universe? This question has stayed with us since before
the time of the Greeks until now, and ours is the first generation
poised to be able to answer it. The discovery of exoplanets, planets
orbiting other stars, has been explosive. The number of known exoplanets
is now well over 3000. Some of these planets are rocky, and are the
right distance from their star, not too hot and not too cold, for life.
Do these planets have atmospheres? Could life have started on their
surfaces? Are there signs of life on other planets that we would have a
chance to see from Earth, and how do we find these signatures? I will
talk about how far exoplanet science has come to answering these
questions, and how far we still need to go in our search for life on
other worlds.
Friday, 14th December 2018
How We'll Live on Mars
A talk by Colin Stuart
Cost: £3 for non-members
Humans will soon make their first trip to Mars.Friday, 11th January 2019
The Cradle of the Sun - Did Our Solar System Form in a Star Cluster?
A talk by Dr Richard J Parker
Cost: £3 for non-members
Dr Parker is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow, working at the University of Sheffield who delivered a talk about the "Search for Planet 9" at the 2018 BAA Winchester Weekend. For this talk, he will be considering where our Sun was born.
Stars like the Sun do not form in isolation, but rather in the company of tens to millions of other stars. These stellar birth-places are often very hostile astrophysical environments, where planets can be disrupted or prevented from forming altogether. However, there are several strands of evidence that suggest the Sun MUST have formed in such a dense environment. In this talk, I will discuss the evidence for and against the Solar System's formation within a star cluster.
Friday, 8th February 2019
The search for Planet Vulcan
A talk by Paul Fellows
Cost: £3 for non-members
Paul Fellows is an old friend of Hampshire Astronomical Group, having been a member back in the days when we were the Portsmouth Astronomical Group.
Details of Paul's talk will be posted here shortly.
