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A&G Highlights Meeting Programme
December 13th
16:00 Prof Mike Lockwood (President)
Welcome and Announcements
16:05 The RAS Diary Talk 2024: Dr Deborah Kent (St. Andrews University)
To Burlington House and the Kerguelen Islands: The 150th anniversary of RAS movements near and far
TBC
16:40 Prof Sugata Kaviraj (University of Hertforshire))
Dwarf galaxies in deep-wide surveys: a new frontier in the study of galaxy evolution
Dwarf (M < 10^9.5 MSun) galaxies dominate the galaxy number density, making them critical to a complete understanding of galaxy evolution. However, typical dwarfs are not bright enough to be detectable, outside the very local Universe, in past large surveys like the SDSS, because they are too shallow. The dwarfs that do exist in such surveys have extreme star formation rates, which makes them anomalously blue and unrepresentative of dwarfs in general. New deep-wide surveys from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), LSST and Euclid are poised to revolutionise our understanding of galaxy evolution, by offering unbiased statistical samples of dwarfs, for the first time, out to at least z∼0.4. Using several thousand dwarfs in the COSMOS field, we will demonstrate the game-changing potential of such surveys, by exploring four key aspects of galaxy evolution in the dwarf regime, which we were previously restricted to studying only in massive galaxies: star formation, quenching, morphologies and AGN activity.
Prof. Sugata Kaviraj (University of Hertforshire), Sugata Kaviraj is Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College Oxford. Before joining Hertfordshire, he spent his postdoctoral career at Oxford (funded by Leverhulme Early-Career Fellowship), UCL (funded by a Research Fellowship from the 1851 Royal Commission) and Imperial College London (funded by an Imperial College Research Fellowship). He is a past recipient of the Royal Astronomical Society's Winton Capital Award.
17:10 Dr Ryan Ogliore (Washington University, St. Louis)
Sample Return Missions: Past, Present and Future
Laboratory analyses of objects from space have revolutionized our understanding of the Solar System and our place in it. The extraordinary precision and advancing technology of Earth labs allow us to precisely measure the ages and compositions of even very tiny samples. Meteorites fall to Earth naturally and provide snapshots of the debris that built the planets but are not a comprehensive survey of the important bodies in the Solar System. Sample-return missions to far-away planets, asteroids, moons, and comets are the pathway to a comprehensive understanding of the Solar System's origin and evolution. In this talk I will discuss what we learned from the comet samples returned by NASA's Stardust mission, and technologies that will enable sample return from Mercury to Pluto within the coming decades.
Dr Ryan Ogliore (Washington University, St. Louis), Ryan Ogliore is an associate professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from Claremont McKenna College and received his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology. His graduate research was in cosmic ray astrophysics and he currently uses various micro-analytical techniques to study extra-terrestrial samples from all over the Solar System. He has worked on several past, current, and future NASA missions in planetary science, heliophysics, and astrophysics.
17:40 Prof Mike Lockwood (President)
Closing Remarks
Drinks RAS, Burlington House