Unearthly Elements

We all know that a pint of beer is made of about 90 to 95% of water... but... where does water come from? Did it fall from the sky? From space? Was water brought to Earth by asteroids? What exactly is an asteroid? And how can we know what an asteroid is made of? If you ever were kept awake at night by any of those questions, fret not! I have spent (too) many sleepless nights trying to answer these just for you! And one thing I can guarantee you, is that it wasn't brought by aliens!

A stable oxygen supply will be essential for living on the Moon, both for breathing and as an oxidising propellant for rockets (to return to Earth and/or for onward missions into deep space). In this talk, we will discuss recent work undertaken at the School of Chemistry in Glasgow, in collaboration with the European Space Agency, that suggests how both oxygen and potential building materials could be sourced in-situ from the most abundant resource on the Moon – moonrock itself.

During total solar eclipses, the moon is perfectly aligned to block out the bright light coming for the surface of the Sun, revealing the faint outer solar atmosphere, called the corona. Analysis of this coronal light shows a puzzling feature - the hot surface of the Sun is at thousands of degrees, but the faint corona is even hotter at millions of degrees. This coronal heating problem has been a major topic of solar physics research for decades, and I will show how the corona is observed to help us crack this mystery.