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Prof Rob Jeffries – Gaia: the billion star mapping machine

15th Jun 2020 at 7:30 pm 9:30 pm

Professor Jeffries is from the astrophysics group at Keele University.

The European Space Agency Gaia satellite was launched in December 2013. The aim of the mission was to map the precise positions and motions of a billion stars and nearer objects in our own Milky Way Galaxy and solar system. In April 2018 Gaia released its intermediate results catalogue, which gave us the first fruits of its labour.

In this talk I will briefly explain how the Gaia satellite works, and then spend most of my time explaining what kind of science Gaia can do, and showing some of the remarkable results and insights that have emerged from the first half of its enormous dataset, including the making of our Milky Way and the births, lives and deaths of stars There will be an inevitable skew towards my own speciality, which is understanding how stars like the Sun are born in clusters and associations and how those clusters disperse to become part of the Galactic population.

This talk is free to everyone – watch on the link below:

https://youtu.be/NowjQ5CqvqQ

Gaia: The billion star mapping machine

Details

Date:
15th Jun 2020
Time:
7:30 pm – 9:30 pm
Event Category:

Online via Zoom