Pythagorean Astronomy: Learned Societies and Society Learning

Posted on 2 June 2021 by Chris North

This month, we’re joined by two people who’ve just been elected to prestigious roles in science here in the UK. Professor Mike Edmunds has just become President-elect of the Royal Astronomical Society, while Professor Bernard Schutz has recently been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Both these societies have a long history, and we
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Join Our 2021 Online Summer Schools

Posted on 25 May 2021 by Grace Mullally

For the fifth year, Cardiff University School of Physics and Astronomy are running a summer school for AS level students interested in studying Physics at University. This year, as in 2020, the summer school will run online, from Monday 7th to Friday 18th June. We are excited to announce that the summer school will take
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Pythagorean Astronomy: Revisiting Venus

Posted on 29 April 2021 by Chris North

Last September, a team of scientists led by Professor Jane Greaves announced the detection of a rare gas, phosphine, in the atmosphere of Venus. With no plausible explanations of how it could be there, one possibility remaining was that it was being produced by some sort of microbial life floating in the cloud decks of
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Arecibo Stories

Posted on 1 April 2021 by Chris North

Arecibo Stories brings together memories of the Arecibo Telescope from those who used it. The telescope sadly collapsed in December 2020, but part of it will live on through the stories that we tell. This game works best on a computer (not a tablet or mobile device), and may not be compatible with some older
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Pythagorean Astronomy: Catching a Shooting Star

Posted on 30 March 2021 by Chris North

Where were you on 28th February 2021, just before 10pm? If you were in parts of Wales, or the west of England, you may have seen a bright flash streaking in the sky. This was a fireball – a bright kind of meteorite which is a special sight in its own right. But this was
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Pythagorean Astronomy: Astrobiology and Technosignatures

Posted on 4 March 2021 by Chris North

The idea of life elsewhere is not a new one. Hundreds of years ago it was assumed that there were beings everywhere, before such views were considered heretical, and the determination that places like the Moon were dry airless worlds started to reduce the possible places life could thrive. But even as recently as the
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Gravitational Waves: Meet the Experts

Posted on 23 February 2021 by Chris North

On Saturday 20th February 2021, we hosted a “Meet the Experts” session as part of Cardiff Science Festival. You can watch a recording of the event below. Questions We didn’t get to all the questions live, but the panel kindly answered them by text. Below is a list of the questions and answers, with links
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Pythagorean Astronomy: The Martian Triple

Posted on 2 February 2021 by Chris North

Over the course of the next month, we’ll see the arrival at Mars of not one, not two, but three spacecraft: Nasa’s Perseverance Rover, with its little helicopter Ingenuity; the Chinese Space Agency’s Tianwen-1 mission, which comprises an orbiting spacecraft, a landing platform and a rover; and the UAE’s Hope mission, which is an orbiting
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Pythagorean Astronomy: Review of the Year and Galactic Dynamics

Posted on 31 December 2020 by Chris North

With the end of one of the craziest years in living memory, we start with astronomical reflections on the last 12 months – and how far we’ve come over the course of the last decade. A new results has been published about the structure of our own Milky Way Galaxy, using the emission from carbon
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Pythagorean Astronomy: Watery Worlds and Tumbling Telescopes

Posted on 28 November 2020 by Chris North

A show of two halves, this month, starting with watery moons. One isn’t so surprising – Jupiter’s icy Europa. Known to have an ocean under the thick ice shell, models suggest that the plumes that have been observed may not be from the global reservoir, but from smaller briny pools within the icy crust. The
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