Rob Jeffries

Home Research Outreach Mountains Relativity

Astronomy and Astrophysics Discussion Group

Starting February 6th I will be starting a new monthly astronomy and astrophysics discussion group, meeting on the first Monday of the month. To begin with we will be focusing on the important topic of Relativity and its impact on Astonomy and Physics (see opposite). But we will be continuing to talk about anything that crops up in the news, particularly on the subject of Exoplanets and the Search for Life, where both I and Keele Astrophysics have a strong interest.

The venue will be the recently refurbished Keele Earth and Space Observatory. The cost will be no more than a small (voluntary!) donation to the observatory fund. You can park next to the observatory (if there's room).

Next Meeting

The next meeting is on August 13th, 7:30pm. We will be discussing Gravitational Waves and their detection, basing our discussions on a short book - Relativity: A Very Short Introduction by Russell Stannard (Oxford).

The last session on black holes (as powerpoint) can be obtained here and homework from a previous session was to watch this film. We will also of course be keeping up with the news, especially on Exoplanets, where Kepler has been making further exciting discoveries.

Useful Resources

Simulation software. I will be using Celestia to demonstrate Exoplanet systems. The software is free and runs on Windows, Linux and Macs. I am developing some resources to show WASP planets and will put them here.

Much of the data and the plots I will show come from exoplanets.org, which has excellent catalogues and tools for exploring up-to-data exoplanetary data. Another source of reliable information is the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia.

Interesting link!. Try identifying some Kepler planet candidates yourself. See www.planethunters.org

I have developed some astrophysically accurate add-ons for the Celestia project. Each of the links below is a zip file containing a README file telling you where to place the contained files. Let me know if you have any problems (or indeed successes)!
wasp1.zip
wasp2.zip
kepler10.zip