Dr Hannah Wakeford will be joining us on Wednesday 31st May to give us a talk entitled “Diving through exoplanet atmospheres”.
Dr Wakeford is a lecturer in Astrophysics at the University of Bristol and uses space telescopes like Hubble and JWST to measure the atmospheres of alien worlds. She also runs the podcast Exocast and has a book Bang!! The Complete History of the Universe with some rather famous co-writers.
The study of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the Sun, is fascinating new field of discovery. The question “how do stars and planetary systems form and evolve?”” is one of the biggest in Astronomy and is at the root of one of the most important questions we have had since we looked up at the stars: “How did we get here?”. I will take us on a journey to explore how we measure and understand the nature these strange new worlds beyond our Solar System. We will dive into the atmospheres of alien planets to discover the truly wild nature of planets in the universe from chains of rocky worlds around ultra-cool stars to exotic clouds of molten rock in the atmosphere of ultra-hot gas giants.
The venue is the Herschel Museum of Astronomy, 19 New King Street, Bath, BA1 2BL. Doors open at 7:15pm for a 7:30pm start.