COSMIC FORENSIC SCIENCE - How astronomers probe properties of immensely remote objects

Date: Monday 4th September 2017

Time: 7pm

Venue: Waterstones, Sauchiehall Street

Speaker: John Brown

Numbers in astronomy are commonly felt to be incomprehensibly large, though they are exceeded by many in every day life – there ARE more stars out there than grains of sand on all our beaches but less than atoms in a sugar cube.  However, stellar distances, let alone that across the universe are truly mind-boggling as are the minimum and maximum densities of cosmic matter. More amazing is how WE deduce mass, density, temperature etc for objects immensely remote in space and time. This talk/ Q&A address such cosmic statistics and the remote CSI techniques by which astro sleuths nail them.

John Brown has been 10th Astronomer Royal for Scotland (ARfS) since 1995. Prior to his retirement in 2010, he was 10th Regius Professor of Astronomy in Glasgow University. He has published around 300 research papers mainly on inverse problems in data modelling, stellar mass loss, and energetic solar plasmas, the last winning him the 2012 Royal Astronomical Society Gold Medal. In the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours he received an OBE award for ‘services to promotion of astronomy and science education’ and at the American Association of Physics Teachers Cincinnati July 2017 their Klopsteg Prize for outstanding contributions to physics teaching.