© Pint of Science, 2024. All rights reserved.
Get hands-on with a spectroscope: an instrument invented in the early 1800’s for splitting light into its different frequency components, find out how it later enabled the discovery of Helium and how they are still used today to characterize stars and to detect exoplanets. Experience the parallax effect and how we can use this everyday effect to determine the distances to stars in our stellar neighbourhood.
Ringing stars and the search for other worlds in our Galaxy
Professor Bill Chaplin
(Professor of Astrophysics and leader of the NASA Kepler Mission)
In this talk, Professor Bill Chaplin will present the latest results on newly discovered planets orbiting other Sun-like stars in our Galaxy, and explain how the ringing nature of the stars allows us to construct detailed family portraits of these newly discovered planetary systems
The Lives of Massive Stars
Dr Ian Stevens
(Senior Lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham)
In this talk, Dr. Ian Stevens will describe his work on extremely massive stars. These objects which can be 50 or 100 times more massive than the Sun, have extremely dense, supersonic stellar winds, that have profound effects on the environments within galaxies. When two of the massive stars are in a close binary system, things can get very exciting indeed.
Performance by Leon Trimble #2
Leon Trimble
(Audio-visual artist and BOM Fellow)
We are delighted that this Pint of Science event will feature a performance by Leon Trimble, a Birmingham-based audio-visual artist and Birmingham Open Media (BOM) Fellow who experiments with the live translation of physical science instruments. He will be live-mixing data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) into his music.
Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.