The State of the Universe: The 40th Annual Astronomy Weekend
I and 108 others willingly submitted ourselves to be bashed about the head by the mystery that is our universe. Actually I'm not sure we can use the possessive "our" - the Universe answers to no one (except possibly Einstein and Hawkins). We are here at the University of Oxford's Department of Continuing Education to continue learning about what we find ourselves stuck in - the Cosmos.
This is the 40th weekend and there are two people in the audience who were there at that first meeting in April 1978. This is my second visit; my first in 2016. Rawley Hall hasn't changed, the bar, restaurant and lecture theatre are the same as I remember, but there are loads of new enthusiasts keen to learn more about this space we, for whatever reason, inhabit.
We arrived Friday evening and brush up against people we've never met before. Unless you're one of the regular returnees and then it is the occasion for a glorious reunion. We have just enough time after registering to find our room, prepare for dinner and pop to the bar for a pre-dinner glass of surprising good Pinotage.
Entering the dining room too late you find a vacant seat and look gingerly at the other four on your table. Passing the bottled water (still or sparkling) prompts you to introduce yourself to the person on your left or right who looks the least intimidating. The table exhales a collective sigh of relief as the ice is broken and we talk about golf handicaps, working in China, how many weekends attended and no my husband couldn't come - he died a while back.
After dinner we're into the talks, beginning with the State of the Universe an introduction by the Svengali of the weekend Professor Robert (Bob) Lambourne. Frankly the Universe's in a mess - black holes marauding all over the place or worse still sitting in the middle of our Galaxy gobbling up stars left right and centre. Then there's those pesky gravitational waves which upset space/time and get Americans hugely excited about winning a Nobel Prize. Bob was hugely enthusiastic about the progress in the last 40 years - the first Weekend was about the time Columbus discovered America and the advances in the astrolabe since then are beyond belief. He went on to trail what was coming up over the weekend - I missed that as I was refilling my glass with that lovely Pinotage in the bar.
And so to bed. Except it was extremely hot on the third floor. No complaints about the room - two twins so I could sleep in one on Friday night and the other on Saturday. The bathroom was huge. The only shortcoming, and it was a minor one, was the socket for my electric tooth brush. It was six feet off the floor which meant that the cable swung in mid air. I solved it by placing the small rubbish bin on the sink edge and the electric tooth brush rested in its holder charging away undisturbed.
After a fab breakfast, I was up at 7:30 and showered and dressed by 8, we launched into our first talk "The State of Exoplanet Astronomy" expertly delivered by Prof Andrew Norton of the Open University - I remember when the OU was just a twinkle in Harold Wilson's eye - but enough of me. Andy was full of facts about all the exoplanets that have been recently discovered: you wait one hundred years and just one or two turn up but now we're tripping over the damn things. Not only do we suspect that every star has planets, some have an embarrassment of them. In 2017 there was discovered 40 odd light years away TRAPPIST 1 with 7 planets orbiting it! the cheek! Also , astronomers keep discovering planets orbiting stars in the "Goldilocks" zone - not too hot and not too cold where liquid water could exist.
Imagine, there may be aliens on an insignificant planet in the TRAPPIST 1 system, looking out and seeing Earth saying to each other;"Nah, no chance of intelligent life there". Well they would have seen "Fawlty Towers" and heard "The Hitchhiker's Guide" and with any luck "The Avengers" with Diana Rigg. Talking about her there was a lady on the weekend who was the spitting image of Helen Mirren. Not only that she smiled like our Helen. I asked for her autograph but she ran off shouting "Don't they vet for idiots at these weekends?"
After Andy, Prof Patrick Irwin of Oxford University brought us up to speed on the State of the Solar System. I really liked his talk. Loads of lovely pictures in colour and high definition of the planets - except Earth - suspect it was a foggy day when that one was taken. Anyway Pat told us all about the space missions to the planets - especially Saturn, Jupiter and Pluto - although I felt sorry for Uranus and Neptune as we appear to have forgotten about them.
The really fascinating thing about Uranus and Neptune is the speed of their planetary winds.These planets are miles away from the Sun so the energy they receive to drive any atmospheric effect is minimal. We know, however, that Neptune emits more heat than it receives so there's an internal heat source which could power its winds. Uranus is strange - it spins spins on its side. This means that at the poles it experiences 42 years of darkness and 42 years of continous sunlight since it takes 84 years to orbit the Sun. There's no detectable internal heat source to drive the high winds - the unusual seasons probably cause that. Fascinating.
That took us to Saturday lunch and we had a few hours to explore Oxford; I explored my room it was so big. Following that break and coffee it was the turn of Dr Matthew Malek to fill us in on the state of astroparticle physics. Frankly this went over my head and through my body. The only thing I remember about Matt's talk was the fact that we were being hit by neutrinos which were created 10 to the minus 26 secs after the Big Bang. Having travelled for some 14 billion years they are pretty exhausted and weak by the time they reach us so the changes of detecting them are not great. But the thought of something so old lazily going through my body rather enlivened me.
Then it was time for dinner but not before another glass of lovely South African red. I sat with different people this time and we chatted about pensions, part time working and funeral plans: someone mentioned Einstein but we shut them up.
After dinner Bob introduced Dr Geoffrey Thomas - the founder of the Astronomy Weekends and he gave us a fascinating talk about its origins and how he and Bob worked together over 30 years. Bob then gave us a rundown of the astronomical landmarks from the last 40 years. It was clear that Bob loved organising the Weekends and meeting many old friends - so many participants return year after year. I grew quite fond of him because of that and his wide knowledge of astronomy and his awful jokes and anecdotes. And then time for bed but not before one last glass of wine.
Sunday morning saw me eating a full English and talking to a few other guests about the cost of university, the night's thunderstorm, and extra mural activities along with Equity Release. This led nicely onto the first of two talks. This was on the State of Galaxies by Sandor Kruk, a DPhil student who bravely stood in for his supervisor who was unable to make it on account of just having had major heart surgery - he's doing fine - thanks for asking.
Sandor did a great job telling us about the discoveries made about the shape, size, spin and evolution of galaxies. How new instruments have blown open the skies - since the launch of the Hubble telescope in the 90's viewing thousands of galaxies and seeing back 1.5 billion years to planned space telescopes that will view billions of objects and reach back to 200 million years after the Big Bang. This was mind blowing stuff and along with theories as to why galaxies are like they are - the rate of star formation in them and the factors that affect that. It was a pretty impressive talk.
the last lecture of the Weekend fell to Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Anyone old enough to have watched Patrick Moore on a grainy black and white TV screen will know about her. She discovered the first pulsar - not, unfortunately as it turned out, signals from little green men - but fast rotating neutron stars the send out incredibly regular pulses of radiation (Pulsars).
The talk was, as to be expected, very clear and informative. She talked at a leisurely pace, with an air of authority. I think most of us there knew about pulsars, and how Dame Jocelyn was instrumental in their discovery and identification back in the late 1960s. They are mean buggers. First discovered through their tell tale radio wave emissions they don't stop there. They spit out ultra high energy X rays and gamma rays in a narrow beam of intense radiation that sweeps across our field of view.
The regularity of this beam is startling - it's calculated that since the death of the dinosaurs 60 odd million years ago a pulsar's rotation will have slowed down by a second. These stars are remnants of super novae - the intense pressures created during that mega explosion compacts the remaining material into an ultra dense body. One thimble full of a pulsar weighs the equivalent of the world's population - 6 billion people.
Some pulsars have huge magnetic fields in the order of 10 to the 10 Teslas and similarly impressive electric fields - no trouble recharging your Tesla e-car there. There are binary pulsars, pulsars twinned with ordinary stars, a few unfortunates circling black holes and some with planets orbiting them. No one knows how you could have planets orbiting a pulsar given its origins. Life on the surface would be rather uncomfortable .
And that was it. Just past noon on Sunday we dispersed and headed home, full of images and ideas generated at this fun weekend.
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