Of Exoplanets and Cosmology plus an Astronomy MOOC
John Murrell
Following Prof. Bill Chaplin’s interesting talk on exoplanets next week there is a talk on a similar subject by Prof. Giovanna Tinetti on Exoplanets to the Society of Popular Astronomy Meeting in London on Saturday. Details at http://popastro.com/meetings/index.php . As a charity SPA meetings are open to all at no charge.
On the Cosmology and perhaps a bit more technical front the Institute of Physics have just published a free Ebook on ‘The Dark Universe’ it can be downloaded at http://iopscience.iop.org/book/978-0-7503-1373-5?utm_medium=email&utm_source=iop&utm_term=&utm_campaign=11556-34071&utm_content=The%20Dark%20Universe by Prof. Catherine Heymans. Only 25 pages but a lot of current research is covered including her own involvement with KiDS.
There are a couple of interesting talks by Prof. Heymans linked to her web page at http://www.roe.ac.uk/~heymans/ the TED talk is a really good summary in 8:23 which is all speakers are allowed for TED talks.
If you want to learn more of the astronomical background including current research areas Prof Heyman and Prof. Andy Lawrence run a Massive Online Open Course on ‘AstroTech’ available for free at https://www.mooc-list.com/course/astrotech-science-and-technology-behind-astronomical-discovery-coursera. This re-run started on the 17th of April so you have a couple of weeks to catch up but is well worth the effort.
John Murrell