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 …