Welcome to Carolian Astronomy Society in Kidderminster
Your local Astronomy Group in the Wyre Forest and surrounding areas.
The Carolian Astronomy Society (CAS) is based in Kidderminster, Worcestershire UK. Membership is open to any individuals who support and wish to further the Objectives of the Society. We welcome new members, particularly the less experienced and newcomers to our fascinating hobby.
If you would like to email us please send to info@carolianastro.co.uk, or to speak to us please telephone 07821 896 304 (Michael Bryce – Website and Social Media Secretary).
Next Carolian AS Meeting:
Carolian Astronomy Society meet at Oldfield Hall, King Charles I School, Comberton Road, KIDDERMINSTER. DY10 1XA. Meetings are open to anyone with an interest in Astronomy and Space. Come along and meet other Astronomers in your local area.
Wednesday 13 November
Our next meeting takes place on Wednesday 9 October at 7:30 pm. Doors open at 7:15.
Our Speaker this time is Professor Nial Tanvir of the University of Leicester with a talk entitled “Making Waves”
The collision of two neutron stars, 140 million light years away, created waves among the astronomical community not just for what it told us about the stellar interaction itself but also for how it was observed and analysed. Professor Nial Tanvir from the University of Leicester’s School of Physics and Astronomy was one of the key figures in this event.
Professor Tanvir has a fascination for gamma-ray bursts (GRB), the enormous, distant explosions which provide insight into the deepest depths – and hence the earliest history – of the universe. Back in 2009 he led a team which identified what was then the most distant object ever identified, a GRB with a redshift of 8.2 about 13 billion light years away.
Four years later, Professor Tanvir made another step forward, leading a team which used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to identify the first known kilonova. This is the immediate after-effect of a short duration gamma-ray burst (SGRB), an intense flash lasting for just a couple of seconds. It was theorised that SGRBs – and hence kilonovae – might be caused by the collision of two extremely massive but incredibly compact stellar objects such as two neutron stars (or a neutron star and a black hole).
Such collisions are hugely important because they offer a potential answer to one of the great outstanding questions of physics: where do heavy elements come from? Elements heavier than iron (called r-process elements, meaning rapid neutron capture) aren’t created inside stars like lighter elements. But they must be created somehow, somewhere – and neutron star mergers are likely candidates. Added to which, such collisions should be a rich source of gravitational waves.
On 17 August 2017, two facilities – the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in the USA and the Virgo interferometer in Italy – identified a gravitational wave source which correlated with gamma rays detected by NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope. Professor Tanvir was at the time principal investigator on a project called VINROUGE which was using the VISTA facility in Chile, the world’s most powerful near-infra-red survey telescope, to search gravitational wave events for evidence of a kilonova.
“We were really excited when we first got notification that a neutron star merger had been detected by LIGO, and immediately triggered observations on several telescopes in Chile to search for the explosion that we expected it to produce,” Professor Tanvir recalls. “In the end we stayed up all night analysing the images as they came in, and it was remarkable how well the observations matched the theoretical predictions that had been made.”
The LIGO/Virgo source was tracked down to the galaxy NGC 4993 so NASA’s orbiting Swift observatory, designed for fast response to such discoveries, was immediately pointed in that direction.
Wednesday 9 October
Our next meeting takes place on Wednesday 9 October at 7:30 pm. Doors open at 7:15. Our Speaker for tonight is Mike Frost. Mike will be his talk entitled “Erwin Finlay Freundlich, Einstein’s Collaborator”. Mike is a long time friend of the Society and his talks are always well received. Detailas of his talk are as follows:
Erwin Finlay Freundlich, Einstein’s Collaborator – a talk by Mike Frost
Erwin Finlay Freundlich was a German astronomer. In the early years of his career he was a colleague of Albert Einstein, and was closely involved in the calculations and observations which proved Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.
He then pursued a peripatetic career in Berlin, Istanbul and Prague. As World War 2 loomed, his family faced a terrifying journey across Europe to escape Hitler’s clutches. Freundlich ended up in Scotland, where he spent the rest of his academic career at St Andrews University.
Erwin’s is a life entwined in the great movements of the twentieth century – political, social, scientific and cultural. I’ve worked with his family and with people who knew him at St Andrews to bring you his story.
Wednesday 11 September
Our first meeting of the 2024 – 2025 Season takes place on Wednesday 11 September at 7:30 pm. Doors open at 7:15. As last time, our meeting venue is Oldfield Hall, King Charles I School. The speaker for the evening is our own David Hodgson who will give a presentation about George Isaak, Physicist and Astronomer.
From Wikipedia:
Isaak was born in Poland on 7 March 1933. His family moved to Germany after the Second World War and to Australia in 1950. Isaak studied at the University of Melbourne, achieving his Bachelor of Science (BSc) in 1955 and Master of Science (MSc) in 1958. A spell in industry followed, in which Isaak worked for ICI in Australia 1959-1960 during which time he patented a spectrophotometer for very high-resolution optical spectroscopy, using the resonant scattering of light by atoms. In 1961 Isaak returned to science at the University of Birmingham from whom he received his PhD in 1966, and where he stayed until his retirement in 1996, at this time taking up an Adjunct Faculty position at the University of Minnesota. Isaak remained active in scientific endeavours until the time of his death. Isaak married once to Umit, a fellow physicist at Birmingham in 1964.
Everyone Welcome. Please remember to bring a mug if you would like tea or coffee.
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If you require any further information please email us at info@carolianastro.co.uk.
We also have a Facebook group page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/carolianastro/