Seminars

18th January – Heloise Stevance (University of Oxford) Just because you can does not mean you should

Machine learning and “A.I” methods have become increasingly popular across the field of astronomy, but the promise of smarter and better solutions is not always delivered. Areas like (early) transient classification have seen many promising proof of concepts published in the last 10 years, yet no good solution is in sight. In this talk I will present what challenges we are facing, what mistakes we have been making and a route to addressing our current needs for rapid decision making as the rate of transient discovery is ever increasing. In the second half of the talk I will raise 4 major reasons why many models do not go beyond the proof-of-concept. Note: the talk will not be ML technical, no prior ML knowledge is required.

25th January – Erin Higgins (AOP) Nucleosynthesis, winds and chemical yields of very massive stars (IAU G2 commission seminar)

The most massive stars provide an essential source of recycled material for young clusters and galaxies. While very massive stars (VMS, M>100 Msol) are relatively rare compared to O stars, they lose disproportionately large amounts of mass already from the onset of core Hydrogen burning. In this talk, I will discuss the impact of stellar wind yields from VMS with optically thick winds, calculated for a wide range of masses (50-500 Msol) at solar metallicity, using the MESA stellar evolution code and a large nuclear network. Interestingly, we find that even when weighted by an IMF, their wind contribution is still an order of magnitude higher than canonical O stars, illustrating the presiding role that VMS have in replenishing their environments with reprocessed material.

1st February – Donna Rodgers-Lee (DIAS) The high-energy environment of Sun-like and red dwarf stars

Detecting the signature of life elsewhere in the Universe is a key goal of modern astronomy. To narrow down the search, we need to understand which exoplanets are likely to host life based on what we know of the conditions that led to life on Earth. In this sense, cosmic rays are thought to be important. Stellar and Galactic cosmic rays can drive the formation of prebiotic molecules, the building blocks of life, in the atmospheres of exoplanets. The flux of stellar and Galactic cosmic rays reaching exoplanets depends on the stellar wind environment of the host star.

I will present our results on the Galactic cosmic ray fluxes for a number of nearby red dwarf and Sun-like stars. I will discuss how studying the high-energy environment of warm Neptunes, gas giant planets that are not typically thought to be habitable, can help inform us in the future about the conditions present on rocky planets orbiting in the habitable zone of their stars. I will also present our recent results studying the high-energy environment of the red dwarf system, GJ 436. Finally, I will discuss briefly how observations with JWST, and upcoming missions such as Ariel, may probe the high-energy environment of gas giants.

8th February – Michael Tremmel (University College Cork) Shedding Light on Hidden Massive Black Holes using Cosmological Simulations

29th February – Michael Simms (National Museums NI) To Here From Eternity: The incredible story of the Bovedy meteorite

The Bovedy meteorite fell near Garvagh in 1969. A rather unremarkable rock, described in meteorite literature as an Ordinary Chondrite, the Bovedy meteorite (and its little brother from Sprucefield) records beneath its blackened exterior a truly remarkable story extending back to the very beginning of the Solar System. This talk will look at what Bovedy, and its fellow L Chondrites (including the Crumlin meteorite), can tell us about the highly dynamic history of the Solar System.

14th March – Simon Jeffery (AOP) Highlights from the SALT survey of hydrogen-deficient hot subdwarfs.

Hot subdwarfs are variously associated with the extreme horizontal branch and helium main-sequence, as well as other low-mass stars evolving to become white dwarfs. About 10% have partially or extremely helium-rich surfaces, with highly heterogeneous properties.

Using the Southern African Large Telescope, a spectroscopic survey was begun to search for and analyse new members of various subclasses.

With over 600 stars observed to date, we have discovered extreme helium stars, heavy-metal subdwarfs, super-hot pre-white dwarfs, planetary nebulae, a compact binary, and magnetic subdwarfs.

We have combined data from SALT, GAIA and TESS to characterise over 460 non-classical hot subdwarfs with high precision, obtaining effective temperatures, radii, luminosities and masses.

Our sample allows us to identify several of the major evolution channels that contribute to the overall hot subdwarf population. This talk will highlight some of our discoveries and present a preliminary view of the new HR diagram for evolved hot subdwarfs.

21st March – James Urquhart (University of Kent) The OGHReS Survey

The evolution of galaxies is controlled by the star formation within them. It is, therefore, crucial to understand the role played by the environment (e.g. density, metallicity, location) in the formation of molecular clouds and their connection with the star formation that ultimately drives the evolution of their host galaxies. New single-dish surveys of the Milky Way are providing, for the first time, a high spatial resolution view of the structure and properties of molecular gas across the inner and outer Galaxy. These are extremely complementary to ALMA and NOMEA studies of the molecular ISM in local dwarfs and nearby spiral galaxies. In this talk I will provide an overview of the Outer Galaxy High-Resolution Survey (OGHReS), which is a large CO survery of a significant fraction of the outer Galaxy. This survey will broaden our understanding of how environmental conditions shape the formation and evolution of molecular clouds and influence star formation in the Milky Way and will be crucial in underpinning the wealth of results emanating from recent nearby-galaxy studies.

11th April – Oliver Dunnett (Queen’s University Belfast) Geographies of outer space: from the speculative to the sublime

This talk will cover a selection of topics centred around a research agenda of geographies of outer space. Geographies of outer space will be defined in the initial part of the talk, to be followed by three case studies: Firstly, the science-fictional encounters with outer space in the works of writers H G Wells and Olaf Stapledon, drawing on the concept of literary geographies. Second, the British Interplanetary Society’s plan for interstellar exploration in the 1970s: Project Daedalus. Finally, the campaign against light pollution in Britain and Ireland, including recent plans to establish a Dark Skies advocacy group in Belfast.

18th April – Georgios Dimitriadis (Trinity College Dublin) The increasing diversity in the thermonuclear supernovae population

The majority of thermonuclear explosions in the Universe seem to proceed in a rather standardised way, as explosions of carbon-oxygen (C/O) white dwarfs in binary systems, leading to the, cosmologically useful, “normal” Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). However, our understanding of the SN physics has altered over the past few decades with the introduction of wide field, high-cadence, all-sky surveys. These surveys have not only increased the populations of established SN (sub)classes, allowing for large-scale statistical studies, they have also unearthed several new subclasses of events that deviate from “normal” SNe Ia in their observational properties, and which require different and not seldom more extreme progenitor systems. These relatively rare events provide both a problem – potentially biasing cosmological measurements if not identified in a distance-independent way – and an opportunity – the potential to understand extreme WD SNe that can inform how the “normal” SN Ia population explodes. In this talk, I will present recent developments in the study of peculiar SNe Ia, both from the theoretical and observational point of view, with a focus on results from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), the current state-of-the-art “discovery transient machine”. I will show the most detailed map of the SNe Ia diversity to date and discuss further research approaches into understanding how a WD explodes.

25th April – Alex Cameron (University of Oxford) Stellar populations in early galaxies: insights from JWST/NIRSpec spectroscopy

Understanding the properties of early stellar populations is one of the primary goals of the JWST mission. Already, NIRSpec spectroscopy of galaxies at high redshift has revealed many surprising properties of galaxies in the early Universe. In this talk, I will present results from two such studies. I will present observations of a galaxy which appears to show an extremely strong contribution from nebular continuum emission, including an unprecedented detected of two-photon continuum emission. This can arise in a system with a prodigiously high ionising photon production efficiency. Based on photoionisation modelling, I will show that one explanation for this system is ionisation powered by very hot stars (T_eff > 10^5 K), which could be indicative of variations in the stellar initial mass function. I will also present observations of nitrogen abundances in the early Universe. The report of enhanced nitrogen abundances in GN-z11 and several other extreme systems has challenged classical chemical evolution models. Numerous mechanisms have been proposed, with many invoking substantial rapid enrichment from massive star winds. Understanding how common this N-enhanced phase is among the high-redshift population will provide insights into the properties of early stellar populations.

9th May 2pm – Sargam Mulay (University of Glasgow) Spectroscopic observations and radiative hydrodynamic modelling of solar flares

Solar flares are energetic and explosive events which produce radiative signatures at all layers of the solar atmosphere. The energy deposition occurs at the lower layers, chromosphere and temperature minimum region (TMR). The plasma properties at these layers during flares could be studied using imaging and spectroscopic observations of cool lines. The seminar is focused on the systematic investigation of cool ultraviolet (UV) emission from molecular hydrogen (H2) observed at the TMR (Mulay et al. 2021 and 2023) and their relationship with other chromospheric lines such as C I and O I. We studied three X-ray flares of C5.1, C9.7 and X1.0 classes observed on Oct. 25, 2014 using the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). Significant emission from five H2 spectral lines appeared in the flare ribbons, interpreted as photo-excitation (fluorescence) due to the absorption of UV radiation from two Si IV spectral lines. The H2 profiles were broad and consisted of two non-stationary components in red and in the blue wings of the line in addition to the stationary component. The red (blue) wing components showed small red-shifts (blue-shifts) of 5–15 km/s ( 5–10 km/s). The nonthermal velocities were found to be 10–25 km/s. The interrelation between intensities of H2 lines and their branching ratios confirmed that H2 emission formed under optically thin plasma conditions. There is a strong spatial and temporal correlation between Si IV and H2 emission, but the H2 emission is more extended and diffuse, further suggesting H2 fluorescence, and – by analogy with flare “back-warming”- providing a means to estimate the depth from which the H2 emission originates. We find that this is 1871±157 km and 1207±112 km below the source of the Si IV emission, in two different ribbon locations. Further, we compared these plasma parameters of H2 emission with the plasma parameters obtained for the cool chromospheric lines of C I and O I. This work motivated us to investigate H2 emission in other solar events, such as flarerelated solar jets, and study the turbulent nature of TMR. Solar jets are small-scale energetic transient events that exhibit a collimated flow of plasma which moves outwards from the solar surface. The study is focused on understanding the nature of H2 emission at the footpoint/spire region of the jet and the role of transition region emission from Si IV lines in generating H2. Such a study for solar jet observations is new and has not been carried out previously. We believe that it will provide useful constraints on models of the chromosphere and TMR during flare-related jet events.

16th May – Johanna Vos (Trinity College Dublin) Exometeorology: Weather on Worlds Beyond our Own

Major technological advances have enabled the discovery of a small number of directly imaged exoplanets. These imaged worlds can be studied in far greater detail than exoplanets detected by indirect methods such as transit and radial velocity techniques. Next-generation telescopes such as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming 30-m telescopes (e.g. ELT, TMT, GMT) will enable direct exoplanet characterization. Based on the handful of exoplanets studied to date, it is clear that interpretation of future observational data hinges on a thorough understanding of their atmospheric processes. In this talk I will discuss our current and future efforts to investigate the atmospheres of imaged extrasolar worlds. In particular, I will discuss how a combination of observational and computational techniques will reveal three critical atmospheric processes: clouds, winds and aurorae. Each of these processes are well-studied in our own Solar System and we can now begin to study them on worlds beyond our own.

23rd May – Mairi O’Brien (Warwick University) White Dwarfs

30th May – Steph Merritt (Queen’s University Belfast) Sorcha: A Solar System Survey Simulator for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time

Over its nominal 10 year lifespan, the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is expected to revolutionise Solar System science, discovering over 5 million main belt asteroids, 300,000 Jupiter Trojans, 100,000 near-Earth objects, and over 40,000 trans-Neptunian objects. This explosion of new detections will provide an unprecedented opportunity for population studies of small bodies within our Solar System. However, like all astronomical surveys, these discoveries will be affected by complex observational biases, obscuring the true properties of the underlying populations. We have thus developed Sorcha, an open-source survey simulator designed to replicate the observational biases of the LSST. Sorcha is the first survey simulator capable of modelling all Solar System small-body populations, demonstrating the power and necessity of this survey simulator for accurate characterisation of our Solar System. The code has been used by the Rubin Solar System Data Products team to generate Data Preview 0.3, a simulated dataset of 15.7 million small Solar System objects. Upcoming science papers by the Sorcha team include using Sorcha to predict Centaur populations and to explore the potential detectability of the theorised Planet Nine and other potential very distant objects with the LSST.

Wednesday 5th June – Bonnie Steves (University of Glasgow) Developing Researchers through Summer Schools in Astronomy

Find out how Summer schools in astronomy have developed over the last 40 years, their impact on researchers and the research community and how you too can join as a participant or help organise a summer school of your own.

27th June – Kate Maguire (Trinity College Dublin) Exploding stars and catastrophic collisions

Supernovae and stellar collisions are the sometimes incredibly luminous, and sometimes not so luminous, deaths of stars that play a vital role in chemical enrichment, galaxy feedback mechanisms, and our understanding of stellar evolution. Type Ia supernovae, the explosions of white dwarfs in binary systems, are vital for constraining the cosmological parameters. In this talk, I will focus on the latest results on the progenitors and explosion mechanisms of Type Ia supernovae from the state-of-the-art transient survey, the Zwicky Transient Facility, and describe how their diversity may impact future precision measurements of dark energy. I will also highlight recent advances in the related area of stellar collisions, which are testing the boundaries of current theoretical models, as well as discuss the link to kilonovae from neutron-star mergers (with and without associated gravitational-wave detections).

4th July – Leonie Hannan (Queen’s University Belfast) A Culture of Curiosity: doing science at home in the eighteenth century

Dr Leonie Hannan (Queen’s University Belfast) is a social and cultural historian focused on Britain and Ireland in the period c.1660-1830. This paper will discuss her recently published, open-access monograph A Culture of Curiosity: Science in the Eighteenth-Century Home (Manchester, 2023). This project reveals the home as a space of emergence for scientific practice and knowledge-making in this era of ‘Enlightenment’. Leonie’s work aims to de-stabilise entrenched hierarchies concerning knowledge, in terms of where and how it was made and by whom.

11th July – Daniel Storey (Queen’s University Belfast) The need for diverse compatible solutes in microbial systems – implications for astrobiology.

In the context of astrobiology, compatible solutes are essential because they enhance the survivability of microorganisms under conditions that are often found on other planets and moons, which can be far more extreme than those on Earth. This ability to survive harsh conditions makes organisms that produce compatible solutes prime candidates for life forms that could exist beyond Earth. Their presence and mechanisms of protection, offer valuable models for understanding how life might adapt and thrive in the extreme environments of other celestial bodies, thereby broadening our search parameters for extraterrestrial life. Preliminary data will explore the critical role of compatible solutes in supporting potential extremophilic microbial life under the harsh conditions of Mars and compare this with some well characterised exoplanets. A second focus of this talk will discuss how, through a diverse range of programs, interactive exhibits, and educational initiatives, the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium can make the science of astrobiology accessible and intriguing to people of all ages. These outreach efforts aim to spark curiosity about the universe, foster a deeper understanding of the scientific challenges and possibilities of finding life beyond Earth, and encourage greater engagement with the AOP.

25th July – Courtney Crawford (University of Sydney) The Hydrogen-deficient Carbon Stars: new updates on dust properties and the progenitor population

The Hydrogen-deficient Carbon (HdC) stars are a class of low-mass variable stars with supergiant luminosities and peculiar abundances. They are theorized to be formed via the merger of a CO-WD and a He-WD. Though they have been known for over 200 years, study of these rare stars has recently been reinvigorated due to the discovery of over 100 new HdCs. While many open questions remain regarding their behavior, in this talk I will discuss recent advancements in two major topics: their dust properties and the progenitor merger population. In the former, we collected a vast amount of photometric data for all known HdC stars and performed a statistical analysis of all observed dust declines, especially focusing on decline frequency. In the latter, we explore the effects of different mass ratios and total masses (of the progenitor binary) on an HdC star’s luminosity, temperature, and oxygen isotopic ratios.

12th October – Jeremy Rigney (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies) The Sun and the (Low Mass) Stars: Searching for Radio Flares and CMEs from M Dwarfs

M dwarfs are low mass stars less than half the mass of the Sun which make up over 70% of the stellar population. Many of these M dwarfs are highly convective rapid rotators, driving high levels of activity in the form of flares thousands of times larger than those observed on the Sun. Observing M dwarfs across the electromagnetic spectrum can provide a better understanding of their similarities and differences from the Sun, and how high levels of stellar activity may be impacting orbiting exoplanets. In particular, low frequency radio emission observations may provide evidence for stellar coronal mass ejections, which would be catastrophic for the habitability of exoplanets.

This talk will focus on the solar-stellar connection, trying to understand radio emission from M dwarfs when compared to the Sun, and the relation between radio emission and bright optical flaring on low mass stars.

26th October – Pavel Kroupa (University of Bonn) The first star clusters and SMBH formation therein

The most massive galaxies started to form earliest and on the shortest time. At their centres the formation began with the first ultra-massive star clusters, weighing 10^7-10^10 Msun, depending on the mass of the post-Big-Bang gas cloud that later (on the downsizing time-scale) evolves to the early-type galaxy or bulge. I will discuss the physical and dynamical processes in these clusters, which, due to the low metallicity, form with top-heavy IMFs, and how the formation of the surrounding spheroidal galaxy dictates their evolution. For spheroid masses larger than a few 10^9 Msun, the central cluster implodes to a SMBH seed which can continue to grow as long as the spheroid keeps forming on the downsizing time-scale. The result of these events is the present-day observed strong correlation between the SMBH mass and its hosting spheroid. This theory also explains the existence of quasars at redshifts larger than 9.

2nd November – Gautham Sabhahit (Armagh Observatory and Planetarium) Massive stars near the Eddington limit 

Radiation pressure plays an important role in the physics of massive stars, from supporting the star against collapse to launching strong radial outflows. As massive stars evolve,  the increasing luminosity and decreasing mass brings them closer to the so-called Eddington limit where the radiative forces balance gravity. I will discuss the consequences of  approaching (and sometimes surpassing) the Eddington limit on the internal structure and mass-loss properties of massive stars. I will briefly present a new mass-loss framework  suitable for massive stars in close proximity to their Eddington limit and discuss the consequences of adopting optically-thick wind physics on the evolution of massive stars.

9th November – Luke Majury (Queen’s University Belfast) Spectral Irradiance Variability in Lyman-Alpha Emission During Solar Flares 

The ultraviolet Lyman-alpha line of neutral hydrogen is the strongest emission line in the quiescent solar spectrum and can radiate a significant proportion of flare energy. The study of this line is vital for understanding flare energy balance and provides valuable diagnostics of plasma properties in the flaring chromosphere. Despite this, there has been a dearth of spectroscopic Lyman-alpha observations during solar flares. The SOlar Radiation and Climate Experiment’s SOLar STellar Irradiance Comparison Experiment (SORCE/SOLSTICE) provided flux and wavelength calibrated spectral irradiance measurements of the Lyman-alpha line between 2003 and 2020. The instrument scanned between 120.3nm and 122.7nm on approximately one-minute timescales for roughly one hour per day. Many of these scans coincided with the impulsive phase of major solar flares, several of which were also simultaneously observed by the Reuven Ramaty High-Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI). This study focuses on two of these flares. We aim to compare the spectral response of the Lyman-alpha line (e.g. core to wing ratio) with the properties of non-thermal electrons determined from the analysis of HXR observations, taking care to disentangle the rastering nature of the observations from genuine beam heating. This may provide insight into how and where different features in the Lyman-alpha line are formed in the lower solar atmosphere under various heating conditions. Such comparisons are important for guiding and interpreting radiative hydrodynamic flare simulations such as RADYN. The spectral response of this fundamental line can also be compared to recently published broadband Lyman-alpha flare observations, and serve as a baseline study for the advent of Lyman-alpha flare observations anticipated from new instruments coming online in Solar Cycle 25.

16th November –  Morgan Fraser (University College Dublin) Weirdness in the gap

There are now in operation multiple sensitive, wide field survey telescopes that scan a large fraction of the sky every night. Thanks to these, we are able to find not just bright supernovae in nearby galaxies, but also a range of fainter, rarer or perhaps unexpected transients. These include transients resulting from the mergers of massive stars, outbursts and eruptions from extragalactic analogs of Eta Car, and more. In this talk I will review some of the most interesting classes of transients that we are now finding in the so-called “luminosity gap”, discuss their implications for theories of stellar evolution, and look forward to what we might expect in the near future with the Vera C Rubin observatory.

23rd November – Lewis Prole (Maynooth University) Simulating Population III star formation

The first stars, known as Population III, were initially believed to be massive (>100Msun) and form in isolation. Recent advancements in simulation resolution have drastically changed this model in favour of the formation of groups of smaller stars forming within each minihalo, the mass function of which is highly unknown, yet inevitably impacts reionisation and metal enrichment in the ISM. This talk explores the environments that Population III stars form in as well as the effects of resolution, magnetic fields and stellar feedback when simulating their formation.

30th November – Fionntan Callan (Queen’s University Belfast) Modelling the Thermonuclear Explosions of White Dwarfs

Type Ia supernovae play a number of key roles in astrophysics: contributing substantially to cosmic nucleosynthesis, injecting kinetic energy in galaxy evolution and acting as cosmological distance indicators. While there is consensus that type Ia supernovae originate from the thermonuclear explosions of white dwarfs the explosion mechanism(s) that produce them are still not understood. In this talk I will discuss our efforts to develop explosion models for type Ia supernovae. In particular, I will present our work simulating pure deflagration and double detonation explosions and discuss the improved non-LTE physics recently implemented into our radiative transfer code in the context of these models.

7th December – John Brennan (Maynooth University) Accelerating Astrophysics Simulations with Neural Networks

In large-scale astrophysics simulations, accurately modeling Pop3 star formation presents a significant computational challenge. Traditional methods make use of sub-grid physics models, which rely on high resolution simulations and thus are computationally expensive. In this talk, we present an improvement to a novel approach for accelerating Pop3 star formation modelling using neural networks which can be easily generalized to include sub-grid models of other physical phenomena.

Our proposed method makes use of a convolutional neural network which, when trained on a dataset generated from high-resolution simulations, learns to effectively interpolate and upscale low resolution data to high resolution data. This method is based on advancements, made in the field of computer graphics and digital imaging, towards enhanced image scaling algorithms and potentially offers a method to accelerate a wide range of numerical codes.

In this talk, we will discuss the key components of our methodology, including network architecture design and training strategies and showcase the advantages of our approach.

14th December – Filippo Maccagni (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) Multi-phase gas flows in and out of nearby galaxies

The star formation (SF) history of a galaxy is regulated by the availability of its cold gas, which in turn is driven by the balance between material accreting from intergalactic space and gas expelled from the galactic disk. Atomic neutral hydrogen (HI) is an excellent tracer of this process and it can be now explored in depth thanks to the exquisite combined sensitivity and resolution of the MeerKAT telescope. MeerKAT observations also enable us to study the  impact of nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN) from the innermost parsecs to the virial radius, allowing us to identify how AGN change the physical conditions of the ISM, over which timescales, and how the activity is sustained throughout the lifetime of a galaxy.

I will show a number of recent and ongoing projects from two MeerKAT Large Survey Programs – The MeerKAT Fornax Survey and MHONGOOSE.  Ultra-deep HI observations enable us to probe the cold gas in and around these galaxies to down to very low-column densities N(HI) ~ 5×10^17 cm^-2 and masses M(HI)~10^6 Msun. Integrating this information with observations of the molecular and ionised gas (e.g. ALMA, MUSE), we obtained a complete picture of the multi-phase gas flowing in and out of galaxies and their interaction with the environment. In particular, I will focus on the mechanisms feeding the AGN duty-cycle of powerful radio sources Centaurus A, NGC3100 and Fornax A and on the impact of the nuclear activity on the surrounding medium.

2022/2023

Thur Sept 22nd Mike Reed (Missouri SU, USA) Asteroseismology of Hot Horizontal Branch Stars

Thur Sept 29th Tim Cunningham (Warwick) White dwarfs as probes of convective overshoot and evolved exoplanetary systems

Thur Oct 6th Grace Telford (Rutgers, USA) New Observational Insights into the Astrophysics of Extremely Metal-Poor O Stars

Thur Oct 13th Holly Preece (MPIA, Germany) Hot subdwarf B stars

Thur Oct 20st Mark Magee (Portsmouth) Type Ia supernovae: The curious case of early light curves & bumps

Thur Oct 27th Dmitrii Kolotkov (Warwick) What makes coronal waves wavy?

Thur Nov 3rd Ingrid Pelisoli (Warwick) Stars don’t self-isolate: some remarkable outcomes of binary evolution

Thur Nov 24th Olivia Jones (ATC, ROE) JWST observations of star formation, evolved stars and stellar populations 

Thur Dec 1st Joe Callingham (Leiden, Netherlands) Radio stars and exoplanets

Thur Dec 8th Rebecca Smethurst (Oxford) The growth of supermassive black holes in the absence of mergers and the effect on their host galaxies

Thur Jan 19th Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay (Warwick) Cosmo-chronology in our neighbourhood of stars and planets

Thur Jan 26th Eamon Scullion (Northumbria) Coronal magnetism and the SULIS mission

Thur Feb 2nd Tolis Christou (AOP) Orbital Motion

Thur Feb 9th Michael Burton (AOP) Ultra-hot Hydrogen Molecules in Interstellar Space

Thur Feb 16th Alyssa Drake (Herts)

Thur Feb 23rd Simon Jeffery (AOP) SALT observations of hot subdwarfs

Thur Mar 2nd Jan van Roestel (Amsterdam)

Thur Mar 23rd Jonathon Mackey (DIAS) Inverse Compton cooling of thermal plasma in colliding-wind binaries

Thur April 20th Maria Madjarska-Theissen (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Max-Planck Institute Göttingen) Eruptive phenomena from small-scale active regions in the solar atmosphere

Mon April 24th Falk Herwig (University of Victoria, Canada) 3D Hydrodynamic simulations of massive main-sequence stars and of accreting white dwarfs

Thur May 11th Tom Jarrett (South Africa Research Chair in Astrophysics and Space Science and Director of the IDIA Visualisation Lab) Data Visualisation with COBRA

Thur May 25th Marco Delbo (Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur) Discovering the original planetesimals of our Solar System

Thur June 1st Chris Watson (QUB) Towards earth-analogue planets

Thur June 8th Yuna G. Kwon (Institut für Geophysik und Extraterrestrische Physik, Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany) On the Dust of Primitive Small Bodies in the Solar System

 

2021/2022

Thur, 30th Sept 2021: Dr. Laura Scott (AOP) – Convective boundary structure and mixing in stellar interiors

Thur, 7th Oct 2021: Prof. Carole Haswell (Open University) – A quest to find the key systems to explore rocky planet composition outside the Solar System

Thur, 14th Oct 2021: Prof. Sukyoung Yi (Yonsei Korea) – On the origin of thin and thick discs of spiral galaxies

Thur, 21st Oct 2021: Prof. Gary Mamon (IAP Paris) – A deep look inside nearby globular clusters: IMBHs or compact stars and possibly stellar black holes? – Note changed time of 11am

Thur, 28th Oct – Thur, 4th Nov 2021: Mid-term break

Thur, 11th Nov 2021: Dr. Chris Harrison (Newcastle University)

Thur, 18th Nov 2021: Luka Poniatowski (KU Leuven)

Thur, 25th Nov 2021: Prof. Mirjana Povic (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia/ Ethiopian Space Science)

Thur, 2nd Dec 2021: Prof. Aida Wofford (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) – Note changed time of 4pm

Thur, 9th Dec 2021: Prof. Eric Emsellem (ESO)

20th January – Jared Goldberg (UCSB, USA) Convective Properties of 3D Red Supergiant Envelopes and their resulting Supernova Shock Breakout

27th January – Megan Schwamb (QUB) Exploring the Edges of the Solar System: Past, Present, and Future

10th February – Richard Morton (Northumbria University) Exploring the corona with Alfvenic waves

17th February – Sasha Tchekhovskoy (Northwestern, USA) What can black hole jets do for you?

24th February – Shenghua Yu (National Astronomical Observatory of China, Beijing) The mHz-Hz gravitational waves induced by double compact objects

3rd March – James Blake (University of Warwick) The Sticky Issue of Space Debris

10th March – Valerie van Grootel (University of Liege, Belgium) A search for planets around hot subdwarfs

24th March – David Eden (AOP) What causes stars to form? 

31st March – Leonard Burtscher (Leiden University, The Netherlands) Astronomy and the climate crisis

7th April — Alison Laird (York) Massive stars and chemical evolution: the impact of nuclear reactions

5th May — Gregg Wade (Royal Military College in Kingston, Canada) Stellar magnetism across evolutionary timescales

19th May — Lauren Doyle (Warwick) Exoplanets and low mass stars

26th May — Alessandro Loni (INAF, Cagliari, Italy) The making of a lenticular galaxy in the Fornax cluster: NGC 1436

16th June — Avi Loeb (Harvard, USA) The Galileo Project: In Search for Technological Interstellar Objects

23rd June — Conor Byrne (Warwick) Binary Stellar Populations: From Variable Stars in the Milky Way to Young Stars in the Distant Universe

 

2020/2021

Thu, 08 Oct 2020: Chiaki Kobayashi (University of Hertfordshire)

Thu, 22 Oct 2020: Claudia Lagos (ICRAR, Perth)

Thu, 29 Oct 2020: V. Mauricio Gomez Gonzalez (UNAM, Morelia)

Thu, 12 Nov 2020: Gloria Koenigsberger (UNAM, ICF)

Thu, 19 Nov 2020: Martin Bureau (Oxford University)

Thu, 26 Nov 2020: Anne-Marie Weijmans (University of St Andrews)

Thu, 03 Dec 2020: Evgenia Koumpia (University of Leeds)

Thu, 10 Dec 2020: Sadegh Khochfar (University of Edinburgh)

 

2019/2020

Wed, 18 Sep 2019: Holly Preece (The Effect of Tidal Interactions on Hot Subdwarf B Stars and Their Pulsations.)

Thu, 10 Oct 2019: Christopher Duffy (The Spatial and Temporal Variation of Mg II Emission Profiles in the Solar Atmosphere)

Thu, 17 Oct 2019: Jorick Vink (The heaviest stars and black holes in the Universe)

Thu, 24 Oct 2019: Apostolos Christou (The Martian Trojans: a natural experiment in asteroid evolution.)

Thu, 3O Oct 2019: Gavin Ramsay (Measuring the brightness of stars from space: flares, outbursts, exoplanets and the inside of stars.)

Thu, 31 Oct 2019: Borislav Nedelchev (Using the MANGA IFU survey to trace the importance of accretion events in the triggering of optical AGN activity and the formation of kinematically distinct components.)

Thu, 07 Nov 2019: Andreas Sander (Next-generation stellar atmosphere models: From understanding spectra to creating a virtual laboratory)

Thu, 14 Nov 2019: Sebastien Viaene (How to measure dust in galaxies? A panchromatic perspective.)

Thu, 12 Dec 2019: Tomer Shenar (Do we understand the progenitors of black holes and neutron stars?)

Thu, 06 Feb 2020: Conor Byrne (Atomic Diffusion and Pulsation in Post-Common-Envelope Binary Stars)

Wed, 12 Feb 2020: Eamon Scullion (SULIS: Solar cUbesats for Linked Imaging Spectropolarmetry)

Mon, 17 Feb 2020: Martin Hendry (The Dawn of Gravitational-Wave Cosmology)

Thu, 27 Feb 2020: Ioana Boian (Connecting massive stars to interacting supernovae)

Fri, 28 Feb 2020: Jonathan Mackey (Magnetised Stellar-Wind Bubbles)

Thu, 05 Mar 2020: Joachim Bestenlehner (The most massive stars in the Local Group: the cluster R136)

Thu, 12 Mar 2020: Helge Todt (Spectral analysis of born-again central stars of Planetary Nebulae)

Thu, 26 Mar 2020: Simon Jeffery (DY Cen — from red giant to [WC] star in 100 years — with strontium)

Thu, 02 Apr 2020: Michael Burton (A method for mapping the distribution of aliphatic carbon in interstellar dust)

Thu, 09 Apr 2020: Apostolos Christou (The origin of Neptune’s peculiar moons)

Thu, 16 Apr 2020: Marc Sarzi (On the Initial Stellar Mass Function in early-type galaxies)

Thu, 23 Apr 2020: Stefano Bagnulo (A high-precision survey of magnetic fields in white dwarfs within 20 parsec from the Sun)

Thu, 30 Apr 2020: Rok Nežič (Polarimetric study of 8 Kreutz comets observed by STEREO)

Thu 07 May 2020: Michael Burton (An introduction to the Cherenkov Telescope Array)

Thu, 14 May 2020: Lauren Doyle (Solar and Stellar Flares and Their Connection)

Thu, 21 May 2020: Erin Higgins (The evolution of massive stars in the Galaxy and Magellanic Clouds)

Thu, 28 May 2020: QUB/AOP PhD students meeting

Thu, 04 June 2020: Noel Richardson (ERAU Prescott, USA) (Constraints on the post-main sequence evolution of massive stars with high precision orbits of evolved systems)

Thu, 11 June 2020: Tony Moffat (UdeM, Canada) (Small Satellites, Big Stars: Results from the BRITE nano-satellites on massive stars)

Thu, 18 June 2020: Rico Ignace (ETSU, USA) (Diagnostics of the Organized Winds of Massive Stars)

Thu, 02 July 2020: Heloise F. Stevance (Univ. of Auckland, NZ)

Thu, 09 July 2020: George Seabroke (UCL)

Thu, 16 July 2020: Ralphael Hirschi (Keele University)

Thu, 23 July 2020: Maritza Arlene Lara-Lopez

Thu, 30 July 2020: Victoria Grinberg (Universität Tübingen)