Celebrating Women Astronomers
When you think of a famous astronomer of the past, the chances are that someone male will spring to mind. But over the past few hundred years, and increasingly in the 20th and 21st centuries, women have made important contributions to astrophysics. This is despite practical and cultural constraints which often restricted their ability to do scientific work and meant that their achievements were overlooked or even attributed to male colleagues. In this talk I will tell the stories of five women who made ground-breaking astronomical discoveries. As well as explaining how their work advanced our understanding of the Universe, I will also delve into the personal and professional challenges which they faced and overcame. The talk is historical, broadly spanning the 17th–20th centuries, but also acknowledges the progress which has been made in recent years to provide opportunities in professional astronomy for everyone.
Speaker biography:
Susan Pyne is a postdoctoral researcher in cosmology at University College London, and also holds an honorary position at the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest. Her research uses weak gravitational lensing, the bending of light by matter, to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. She is currently involved with the ESA Euclid mission, launched in 2023, which will observe billions of galaxies across more than a third of the sky over its six-year lifetime, and is particularly interested in developing and testing new statistical methods to handle the massive amount of data which Euclid and other current surveys will produce.
Beyond her research, she is an advocate for increasing opportunities for women in astrophysics and STEM subjects generally, and regularly contributes to career discussions and outreach activities at London secondary schools as well as talks for the general public.
This talk is exclusively for Friends of the RAS members
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