Regular Meeting

Find out why comets and asteroids are really more like big dusty snowballs and how they act as a "mobile chemistry lab" in space with with Dr. David Benoit (Senior Lecturer in Molecular Physics and Astrochemistry at the E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics, University of Hull)... Could our water come from outer-space and has life started by …

As is traditional, quizmaster Soupy will present his annual Astronomical Christmas Quiz... with goodies to be won! Swot up on your SciFi Theme Tunes, Satellites, EV Silhouettes, Constellations, and AstroTrivia!

Have we been visited before? Are they out there watching… listening… studying us? Brad Gibson (Head of Physics and Director of the E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Hull) will examine the evidence for and against the existence of extraterrestrial life, and walk you through the associated good, bad, and ugly corners …

Dr Richard Parker is an astrophysicist based at the University of Sheffield and since 2017 has held a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin research fellowship, following previous post-doctoral research positions at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and Liverpool John Moores University. His main research interests are in the fields of star and planet formation and he uses computer simulations …

Gravitational waves are disturbances in the curvature of spacetime, generated by accelerated masses, that propagate as waves outward from their source at the speed of light. Now that humanity is able to detect these disturbances, what do they tell us about black holes, neutron stars, dark energy, and the fundamental nature of the universe? Dr …

Dr. Walsh and her colleagues make use of a relatively new technology called the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA for short, which uses the collective view of multiple powerful telescopes. "It’s a huge instrument. The way that we do this is instead of just one telescope, which has a particular field of view, we …

Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes, but the consideration of environment on how these galaxies evolved has often been ignored. Environment is a difficult concept to quantify and the methods used to describe it vary greatly, but the density of a galaxy's surrounding environment can significantly influence the properties of that galaxy. Claire Cashmore, …

Brad Gibson (Head of Physics and Director of the E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Hull) rejoins us to launch us back into full swing with his TripAdvisor Top 10 of Wonders of the Universe. Over the course of an hour, we’ll wander through the darkest (and brightest!) recesses of the cosmos, …

Dr Brad Gibson returns to kick things off for 2022 with a swift tour around some of the oddest things the Universe has to offer. Join us from 7.30pm in the upstairs function room at Henry Boons, £3 non-members, £1 members.

Dr Marie van de Sande is an astrochemist with a particular interest in molecules and dust around evolved stars. Her research is focussed on developing chemical models for AGB outflows. These aim to explain the rich complexity in current observations and help guide future ones. Their goal is to unravel link between chemistry and dynamics …

Everything around us is made up of chemical elements. But where do these elements come from? The answer: stars. The stars that we observe in the night sky undergo many different processes in order to produce the elements. This talk will give you a whistle stop tour of the different types of stars in the …

It took more than 4 decades to build an observatory that could detect the ripples in spacetime that Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicted. In this talk Dr Sue Bowler (University of Leeds) discuss how they do it, why it took quite so long and what the new field of gravitational wave astronomy has to …

Prof Brad Gibson, Director of the E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics; The University of Hull, returns to WADAS to introduce us to Polar Astronomy. The harsh and equally stunning landscapes which define the polar regions of Earth are not immediately thought of as being ideal for conducting cutting-edge explorations of the cosmos.  Despite the challenges that such …

Dr Katharine Johnston from the University of Leeds uses observations taken with radio telescopes such as ALMA in Chile and e-MERLIN based in the UK to understand how massive stars form by being fed material by their surrounding accretion discs Discs have long been theorised to exist around forming stars, but it is only in …

Greg Cooke, University of Leeds, simulates terrestrial exoplanets and paleo climates and uses these simulations to predict possible future observations of terrestrial exoplanets. Some planets have very different chemical compositions to Earth. For example, some may have more methane and carbon dioxide. Others may have no oxygen, which likely means no ozone and therefore little …

Dr David Benoit, Senior Lecturer in Molecular Physics and Astrochemistry at Hull University, brings asks the question of ocean worlds: Could there be life under the ice?

William Herschel became Britain's leading astronomer and Caroline was the first woman to be paid to do astronomy, but they came to this country as economic migrants. They changed astronomy; they drove astronomy forward by improving the technology, doing survey astronomy and data science, looking for aliens, publishing, doing outreach and hustling for money – just …

Society member Matt Gough gives us a talk on Meteors.

Please do come along to an impromptu talk from our Chairman, Soupy, who will guide us through some deep sky jewels that are visible in the Autumn night sky. With a brief synopsis on each object and a star hopping guide on how to get to each object, this will be a tour of some …