Making the Solar Orbiter

Jessica Marshall https://spacem14.imanengineer.org.uk/profile/jessicamarshall https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-marshall-84647989/?originalSubdomain=uk Jessica Marshall is the Principal Spacecraft Systems Engineer on the Solar Orbiter team at Airbus and described how the Solar Orbiter was built. This probe will travel inside the orbit of Mercury and give us our best view to date of the heliosphere, the giant bubble of space around the Sun […]

Growing Supermassive Black Holes

Dr James Aird https://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/people/james-aird We now know that supermassive black holes, with masses of millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, are found at the centres of most galaxies (including our own galaxy, the Milky Way). But where do they come from and how do they get so big? This talk described […]

Aristotle

Professor Edith Hall https://www.gresham.ac.uk/professors-and-speakers/professor-edith-hall/ https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/edith-hall http://edithhall.co.uk/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Hall https://twitter.com/edithmayhall?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor https://www.linkedin.com/in/edith-hall-87217212/?originalSubdomain=uk Professor Hall is Visiting Gresham Professor in Classics. She is a British scholar of classics, specialising in Ancient Greek Literature and cultural history. She is also Professor in the Department of Classics and Centre for Hellenic Studies at Kings College London. From 2017-2018, she was also […]

Trust, Fakes and Overload

Dr Sophie Carr https://www.lms.ac.uk/content/sophie-carr https://twitter.com/SophieBays?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor https://baysconsulting.co.uk/our-team/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiecarrbays/?originalSubdomain=uk The talk was about statistics, mathematics and numbers. The following are notes from the on-line lecture. Even though I could stop the video and go back over things there are likely to be mistakes because I haven’t heard things correctly or not understood them. I hope Dr Carr […]

Cosmic Vision: Fast & Furious

Katherine was appointed Gresham Professor of Astronomy in 2019. She is a Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University and a Research Fellow at St John’s College. Before this she was one of the Royal Society’s University Research Fellows, a Research Fellow of the 1851 Royal Commission, and a Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. […]

STFC Particle Physics Masterclass March 2021

This event was primarily intended for those students taking modules which include particle physics at ‘A’ or ‘AS’ level, but was also open to any physics student or teacher interested in studying or teaching the subject. The Masterclasses consisted of a mixture of talks given by researchers in the Particle Physics Department and virtual visits […]

The Invisible Universe

Professor Priyamvada Natarajan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priyamvada_Natarajan https://physics.yale.edu/people/priyamvada-natarajan priyamvada.natarajan@yale.edu https://campuspress.yale.edu/priya/ https://twitter.com/SheerPriya?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor A hundred years ago, we believed that our own galaxy, the Milky Way, constituted the entire universe. We believed that the universe was stagnant. We did not know about the constituents of the universe – dark matter and dark energy – and we believed that we were […]

What does the future of our Universe look like?

Dr Daniele Sorini https://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/people/daniele-sorini sorini@roe.ac.uk Although we still have several open questions, decades of observations and theoretical modelling have allowed us to reconstruct the past of our Universe. But what will our Universe look like way after the Earth and the Sun will cease to exist, and may intelligent life still develop in the far […]

Reaching for the Stars: Women in Astronomy

A special one-off event as part of the Audacious Women Festival 2021 Hear stories of intelligent, ingenious and often audacious women who have lived and worked at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh over the years. As “Lady Computers”, astronomers, engineers and professional staff these women have often done things first and best, reaching for the stars […]

What is the job of scientists?

It has been said that we live in an age of “alternative facts”. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve learned that ‘following the science’ is not synonymous with ‘following the facts’. The question bears asking: what is the difference between scientific fact and scientific theory? Have we misunderstood what science can, and can’t, be used for? Which […]