Christmas Meeting

We will be holding our 2024 Christmas Meeting on Saturday 7th December from 2pm at the Institute of Physics in London. Lectures will start at 2:30pm, and we shall be holding a drinks reception from 6pm until 7pm in the area outside the lecture theatre.

We expect the meeting to be livestreamed to the BAA YouTube channel.

This meeting and drinks reception is FREE but ticketed. Please note the drinks reception is only available for those who have pre-booked with one of the free tickets. You can book below or on TicketTailor.

Programme

14:00 Doors open
14:30 BAA President – Welcome, notices and awards
14:50 Prof Alan Heavens – Is the Universe expanding too fast?
15:40 Tea
16:20 Dr Kate Pattle – Interstellar Magnetic Fields: From Star Formation to Galaxy Evolution
17:10 Nick James – Sky Notes
17:55 Close

Christmas Drinks

From 6pm until 7pm we will be holding a Christmas drinks reception at the IOP. This will include wine, fruit juice and sparkling water with mince pies.

Booking

Talk Synopses

Alan Heavens – Is the Universe expanding too fast?
Cosmologists have a remarkably successful and relatively simple model of the Universe which accounts beautifully for almost all large-scale observations of the Universe. The model, called ΛCDM, is based on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and includes two mystery ingredients, Λ (Einstein’s cosmological constant) and CDM (Cold Dark Matter). Within this model, observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, left over from the Big Bang, suggest that the Universe should now be expanding at a rate that is about 10% smaller than the rate that we measure today. Should we be worried by that? This so-called “Hubble tension” is exercising astronomers, who debate whether there is some new physics that is not in the model, such as an evolving Dark Energy in place of Λ, or whether we don’t understand the objects that trace the present-day expansion of the Universe quite as well as we think. The James Webb Space Telescope is also weighing in with new observations that may be shedding some more light on the mystery, and in the future, gravitational waves may hold the answer.

Alan Heavens is Professor of Astrostatistics at Imperial College London. After studying in Cambridge he worked for many years at the University of Edinburgh before moving to London in 2012. His research interests have covered many aspects of extracting information on the Universe from cosmological survey data, as well as theory, such as the properties of random fields. An extreme data compression technique he devised for analysing the spectra of galaxies led to the formation of a medical imaging company, Blackford Analysis, which now employs over 100 people working on AI applications to healthcare.

Kate Pattle – Interstellar Magnetic Fields: From Star Formation to Galaxy Evolution
Recent advances in submillimetre dust emission polarimetry are revolutionizing our understanding of the magnetic fields which thread the interstellar media of the Milky Way and other galaxies. In this talk I will discuss the insights which we are gaining into the star formation process and the evolution of the magnetized interstellar medium, on size scales ranging from nearby star-forming regions to starburst galaxies, from recent observations made with the POL-2 polarimeter on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

Kate Pattle is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at University College London. She gained her undergraduate degree at Oxford and her PhD at the University of Central Lancashire, and undertook postdoctoral work in Japan, Taiwan and Ireland before moving to UCL in 2021. Her research focuses on the role of magnetic fields in the star formation process.

Venue

INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS, 37 Caledonian Road, London, N1 9BU