A Sky Full of Science

How do you safely regulate a crowded sky when the rulebook hasn't been updated since 1996? The last United Nations space law principle came out the exact same year as the movie Space Jam, and relying solely on these outdated policies has left Earth's orbit stuck in exactly that: a literal space jam. With satellites hurtling at 17,000 mph and a dependence on slow, ground-based oversight, we can't afford to wait for new treaties to keep space safe. Instead, we can rewrite the rules with code. This talk explores how decentralised science and cutting-edge consensus mechanisms can independently verify orbital data. Discover how technology can act as an impartial, automated referee to build trust where there is none, track what's happening above us, and finally bring satellite operations into the 21st century.

Telescopes have long been pointed at the stars, but only recently have we begun to look at worlds orbiting them! We'll look at a whole suite of different telescopes and the techniques they use to study exoplanets, worlds orbiting other stars.

First discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell, pulsars are highly magnetized, rapidly rotating neutron stars that beam radiation in a narrow column, just like a lighthouse. This short talk will look at the weird features of pulsars - how they are formed as objects, the observations of pulses and the underlying mechanisms. They can be used to test general relativity, as well as acting as very precise cosmic clocks, and we will touch on these applications.