Tue 13 May 11:15: Title TBC
Abstract TBC
- Speaker: Alicia Anderson (Cavendish Astrophysics)
- Tuesday 13 May 2025, 11:15-12:00
- Venue: Martin Ryle Seminar Room, Kavli Institute.
- Series: Hills Coffee Talks; organiser: Charles Walker.
Thu 13 Mar 11:00: Fred Simmons: "Abiogenetic Bias, Axiology, and Teleology."
In person. And with slides.
- Speaker: Fred Simmons (Cambridge Divinity)
- Thursday 13 March 2025, 11:00-12:00
- Venue: Thirkill Room, Old Court, Clare College.
- Series: LCLU Coffee Meetings; organiser: Paul B. Rimmer.
Wed 12 Mar 13:40: IoA neurodiversity survey insights and next steps
We’ll explore the key findings from the recent IoA staff neurodiversity survey. We’ll celebrate the positive experiences shared by participants and shine a light on some of the challenges. The session will address some comments raised in the survey, while also outlining the focus group’s priorities as we move forward.
- Speaker: Lalitha Sairam, IoA
- Wednesday 12 March 2025, 13:40-14:05
- Venue: The Hoyle Lecture Theatre + Zoom .
- Series: Institute of Astronomy Seminars; organiser: Cristiano Longarini.
Wed 12 Mar 13:40: IoA neurodiversity survey insights and next steps
We’ll explore the key findings from the recent IoA staff neurodiversity survey. We’ll celebrate the positive experiences shared by participants and shine a light on some of the challenges. The session will address some comments raised in the survey, while also outlining the focus group’s priorities as we move forward.
- Speaker: Lalitha Sairam, IoA
- Wednesday 12 March 2025, 13:40-14:05
- Venue: The Hoyle Lecture Theatre + Zoom .
- Series: Institute of Astronomy Seminars; organiser: Cristiano Longarini.
Wed 12 Mar 13:15: Accessibility in Astronomy: HTML papers on arXiv, alternative text, and beyond
Astronomy is a heavily visual science. Outreach and education typically rely on beautiful images of the sky, and the communication of research findings in papers and talks revolves around figures. These visual media, while beautiful and effective for many audiences, have historically excluded blind and low vision people from engaging with astronomy. How can we work together towards science that is more inclusive of blind people and people with disabilities more broadly? In this talk, I will discuss accessibility in astronomy, particularly for the blind and low vision community. Topics will include the new HTML paper format on arXiv, writing alternative (alt) text for figures, and some best practices for organizing and attending conferences. Some general background on disability and assistive technology will also be discussed.
- Speaker: Sarah Kane, IoA
- Wednesday 12 March 2025, 13:15-13:35
- Venue: The Hoyle Lecture Theatre + Zoom .
- Series: Institute of Astronomy Seminars; organiser: Cristiano Longarini.
Wed 12 Mar 13:15: Accessibility in Astronomy: HTML papers on arXiv, alternative text, and beyond
Astronomy is a heavily visual science. Outreach and education typically rely on beautiful images of the sky, and the communication of research findings in papers and talks revolves around figures. These visual media, while beautiful and effective for many audiences, have historically excluded blind and low vision people from engaging with astronomy. How can we work together towards science that is more inclusive of blind people and people with disabilities more broadly? In this talk, I will discuss accessibility in astronomy, particularly for the blind and low vision community. Topics will include the new HTML paper format on arXiv, writing alternative (alt) text for figures, and some best practices for organizing and attending conferences. Some general background on disability and assistive technology will also be discussed.
- Speaker: Sarah Kane, IoA
- Wednesday 12 March 2025, 13:15-13:35
- Venue: The Hoyle Lecture Theatre + Zoom .
- Series: Institute of Astronomy Seminars; organiser: Cristiano Longarini.
Mon 17 Mar 13:00: Astrophysical gravitational wave background: from theoretical modelling to detection prospects
When looking at a population of astrophysical gravitational wave sources we can either decide to focus on those sources that are particularly bright, and build a catalogue, or characterise collectively the superposition of all signals from all sources from the onset of stellar activity until today. This stochastic background of gravitational radiation is an interesting observable as it can allow us to extract astrophysical information that cannot be extracted from the study of individual events. In this talk, I will give an overview of different astrophysical populations expected to generate a stochastic background in the frequency band of current and future gravitational wave detectors. I will then review the state of the art of background modeling and illustrate future detection prospects.
- Speaker: Giulia Cusin (Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris)
- Monday 17 March 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: CMS, Pav. B, CTC Common Room (B1.19) [Potter Room].
- Series: Cosmology Lunch; organiser: Louis Legrand.
Lunar eclipse to grace pre-dawn sky
NASA Launches Missions to Study Sun, Universe’s Beginning
NASA’s newest astrophysics observatory, SPHEREx, is on its way to study the origins of our universe and the history of galaxies, and to search for the ingredients of life in our galaxy. Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx lifted off at 8:10 p.m. PDT on March 11 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
Riding with SPHEREx aboard the Falcon 9 were four small satellites that make up the agency’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, which will study how the Sun’s outer atmosphere becomes the solar wind.
“Everything in NASA science is interconnected, and sending both SPHEREx and PUNCH up on a single rocket doubles the opportunities to do incredible science in space,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Congratulations to both mission teams as they explore the cosmos from far-out galaxies to our neighborhood star. I am excited to see the data returned in the years to come.”
Ground controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages SPHEREx, established communications with the space observatory at 9:31 p.m. PDT. The observatory will begin its two-year prime mission after a roughly one-month checkout period, during which engineers and scientists will make sure the spacecraft is working properly.
“The fact our amazing SPHEREx team kept this mission on track even as the Southern California wildfires swept through our community is a testament to their remarkable commitment to deepening humanity’s understanding of our universe,” said Laurie Leshin, director, NASA JPL. “We now eagerly await the scientific breakthroughs from SPHEREx’s all-sky survey — including insights into how the universe began and where the ingredients of life reside.”
The PUNCH satellites successfully separated about 53 minutes after launch, and ground controllers have established communication with all four PUNCH spacecraft. Now, PUNCH begins a 90-day commissioning period where the four satellites will enter the correct orbital formation, and the instruments will be calibrated as a single “virtual instrument” before the scientists start to analyze images of the solar wind.
The two missions are designed to operate in a low Earth, Sun-synchronous orbit over the day-night line (also known as the terminator) so the Sun always remains in the same position relative to the spacecraft. This is essential for SPHEREx to keep its telescope shielded from the Sun’s light and heat (both would inhibit its observations) and for PUNCH to have a clear view in all directions around the Sun.
To achieve its wide-ranging science goals, SPHEREx will create a 3D map of the entire celestial sky every six months, providing a wide perspective to complement the work of space telescopes that observe smaller sections of the sky in more detail, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope.
The mission will use a technique called spectroscopy to measure the distance to 450 million galaxies in the nearby universe. Their large-scale distribution was subtly influenced by an event that took place almost 14 billion years ago known as inflation, which caused the universe to expand in size a trillion-trillionfold in a fraction of a second after the big bang. The mission also will measure the total collective glow of all the galaxies in the universe, providing new insights about how galaxies have formed and evolved over cosmic time.
Spectroscopy also can reveal the composition of cosmic objects, and SPHEREx will survey our home galaxy for hidden reservoirs of frozen water ice and other molecules, like carbon dioxide, that are essential to life as we know it.
“Questions like ‘How did we get here?’ and ‘Are we alone?’ have been asked by humans for all of history,” said James Fanson, SPHEREx project manager at JPL. “I think it’s incredible that we are alive at a time when we have the scientific tools to actually start to answer them.”
NASA’s PUNCH will make global, 3D observations of the inner solar system and the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, to learn how its mass and energy become the solar wind, a stream of charged particles blowing outward from the Sun in all directions. The mission will explore the formation and evolution of space weather events such as coronal mass ejections, which can create storms of energetic particle radiation that can endanger spacecraft and astronauts.
“The space between planets is not an empty void. It’s full of turbulent solar wind that washes over Earth,” said Craig DeForest, the mission’s principal investigator, at the Southwest Research Institute. “The PUNCH mission is designed to answer basic questions about how stars like our Sun produce stellar winds, and how they give rise to dangerous space weather events right here on Earth.”
More About SPHEREx, PUNCH
The SPHEREx mission is managed by NASA JPL for the agency’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions in the U.S., two in South Korea, and one in Taiwan. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission’s principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available at the NASA-IPAC Infrared Science Archive.
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) leads the PUNCH mission and built the four spacecraft and Wide Field Imager instruments at its headquarters in San Antonio, Texas. The Narrow Field Imager instrument was built by the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. The mission is operated from SwRI’s offices in Boulder, Colorado, and is managed by the Explorers Program Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
NASA’s Launch Services Program, based out of the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, provided the launch service for SPHEREx and PUNCH.
For more about NASA’s science missions, visit:
-end-
Alise Fisher
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-2546
alise.m.fisher@nasa.gov
Calla Cofield – SPHEREx
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
Sarah Frazier – PUNCH
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
202-853-7191
sarah.frazier@nasa.gov
The asteroid Bennu is even weirder than we thought
Saturn has 128 new moons – more than the rest of the planets combined
Tue 17 Jun 11:15: Title TBC
Abstract TBC
- Speaker: Prof. Rene Breton (University of Manchester)
- Tuesday 17 June 2025, 11:15-12:00
- Venue: Martin Ryle Seminar Room, Kavli Institute.
- Series: Hills Coffee Talks; organiser: Charles Walker.
Tue 18 Mar 13:00: An Early Heavy Bombardment of the Inner Solar System
The orbital architecture of planets in the Solar System is thought to have been set shortly after its birth. However, ancient asteroid families are highly dispersed, suggesting that perhaps the Solar System remained chaotic until later in its history. Testing this possibility requires precise dating of the collisions that should have generated such families, but planetary surfaces record little to no information from this time. The meteorite record of asteroid collisions represents a separate and more complete archive of Solar System evolution. In this project, we leveraged recent methodological advances to build an extensive record of in-situ meteorite apatite U-Pb ages, sensitive to collisions that induce parent body break-up events. Most asteroid collisions in our record occurred 4480 +/- 20 million years ago. Only highly dispersed asteroid families are potentially co-eval with our U-Pb ages, demonstrating that strong perturbations modifying the orbital eccentricities and inclinations of asteroids were still operating at 4480 Ma. This is unexpected in scenarios where the planets completed their growth and acquired their current orbits in a few Myr within the dispersal of the protoplanetary disk. Our work provides unique evidence that the asteroid belt was still in a state of dynamical chaos 80 Myr after its formation.
- Speaker: Craig Walton (ETH)
- Tuesday 18 March 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Ryle seminar room + ONLINE - Details to be sent by email.
- Series: Exoplanet Seminars; organiser: Dr Dolev Bashi.
Wed 12 Mar 16:00: Transforming Particle Physics with AI
LHC as one of the most data-intensive scientific endeavors provides the perfect link between fundamental physics research and modern data science. As machine learning is transforming our lives, literally, no aspect of LHC physics is left untouched. This starts with identifying data for classic or optimal analyses and extends to anomaly searches and powerful simulations based on perturbative quantum field theory. I will give a few examples for the transformative power of modern machine learning in particle physics, show how our understanding of uncertainties adds new flavors to machine learning, and explain how generative neural networks allow us to realize our dream of making LHC data available to a broad scientific community.
- Speaker: Professor Tilman Plehn - Heidelberg University
- Wednesday 12 March 2025, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: MR3.
- Series: Theoretical Physics Colloquium; organiser: Amanda Stagg.
Improved Halo Model Calibrations for Mixed Dark Matter Models of Ultralight Axions
Improved Halo Model Calibrations for Mixed Dark Matter Models of Ultralight Axions
NASA’s Dawn Sees Crescent Ceres
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft took this image of Ceres’ south polar region on May 17, 2017. Launched on Sept. 27, 2007, Dawn was NASA’s first truly interplanetary spaceship. The mission featured extended stays at two extraterrestrial bodies: giant asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, both in the debris-strewn main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The spacecraft’s name was meant to present a simple view of the mission’s purpose: to provide information on the dawn of the solar system. The three principal scientific drivers for the mission were to capture the earliest moments in the origin of the solar system, determine the nature of the building blocks from which the terrestrial planets formed, and contrast the formation and evolution of two small planets that followed very different evolutionary paths.
Dawn completed the first order exploration of the inner solar system, addressed NASA’s goal of understanding the origin and evolution of the solar system, and complemented investigations of Mercury, Earth, and Mars. Dawn’s mission ended on Nov. 1, 2018, after two extended missions.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Mon 02 Jun 13:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Eleonora Di Valentino (University of Sheffield)
- Monday 02 June 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: CMS, Pav. B, CTC Common Room (B1.19) [Potter Room].
- Series: Cosmology Lunch; organiser: Thomas Colas.
Tue 06 May 13:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Matthew Johnson (Perimeter Institute and York University)
- Tuesday 06 May 2025, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: CMS, Pav. B, CTC Common Room (B1.19) [Potter Room].
- Series: Cosmology Lunch; organiser: Thomas Colas.