January Meeting - Dr. Robert Izzard
Our next monthly meeting is on Thursday, 2nd January 2020 at 7:30pm.
Binary stars: astrophysical laboratories
The stars in the sky are not always isolated and alone: many live with companions in binary star systems. If the stars in a binary are close enough they can interact by interchanging mass and spin, leading to astophysical phenomena like thermonuclear supernovae and gamma-ray bursts.
I explain how binary stars are bound by the fundamental force of gravity, and how they can escape this force when one of the stars explodes. Some of these we see as hypervelocity stars zooming out of our Galaxy, while those that remain bound can make the recently-detected gravitational waves predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.
Binary stars provide a laboratory in the sky to study such fundamental physics and are critical to our understanding of the Universe. I will show some computer simulations of binary stars as used in our state of the art research.
Dr. Robert Izzard
Visitors are most welcome to attend. We charge just £5 (£4 Junior/Student guests) per meeting to help cover the cost of the room hire.
For more details of the meeting location go to the meetings page.
If you have questions about astronomy, choosing and using telescopes and other equipment, John Evans may be able to help here –
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| John Axtell has a forty minute, once a month, programme on Brooklands Radio. Details of which and a link to John’s podcast can be seen on our | Matt’s Books of the Month
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