Royal Observatory Edinburgh
Blackford Hill
Edinburgh
EH9 3HJ
Scotland
In-Depth Astronomy Talks
17th Jan: The Surprisingly Blurry Line Between Stars and Planets – Trent Dupuy How small of a star can form out of a molecular cloud? How big can a planet grow within a circumstellar disk? Surprisingly, observations suggest that stars and planets may overlap in size. And new observations from JWST and Gaia may finally answer these questions definitely in the coming years. 24th Jan: Warped and torn circumstellar discs: when planet formation gets messy – Alison Young I will introduce the weird effects we get when binary/triple stars have a tilted planet-forming disc which gets bent, twisted and sometimes broken. I will show some recent images of these discs and talk about what they show- in particular, the first observation of the disc tearing effect in nature that I was involved with (which even hit the Daily Mail in 2020!) and the story behind it. 31st Jan: Crashing into a comet with the DART mission – Cyrielle Opitom If an asteroid is on a collision course for earth, could we stop it? The DART mission aims to find out. By crashing a spacecraft into a small asteroid, we have changed its course slightly, which could be enough to nudge an earthbound. We’ll be taking a look at how DART did it, the scientific information it has revealed, and how it was observed, including setting up Kenya’s largest telescope to watch! |
Hourly Schedule
Tuesday 14th January
- 7:00pm - 8:00pm
- TBC
Tuesday 21st January
- 7:00pm - 8:00pm
- TBC
Tuesday 28th January
- 7:00pm - 8:00pm
- TBC
