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We can now announce our speakers and topics for our 2026-2027 lecture series.
Join us for some exciting talks led by wonderful guest speakers over the next year.
Entry to these is free to all, and all lectures are held in Room 6.41 of the Royal College building at Strathclyde University. This can be accessed via the James Weir building on Montrose Street.
More details of each talk is to come, and we hope to see you there!
2026
17th September 2026 - Space Telescopes & Star Clusters | Dr Veronika Dornan, Post-Doctoral Researcher @ University of Edinburgh
15th October 2026 - The ESA Comet Interceptor Mission | Prof Colin Snodgrass, School of Physics & Astronomy @ University of Edinburgh
19th November 2026 - Frontiers of Black Hole Astronomy with the Event Horizon Telescope | Dr Kazunori Akiyama, Associate Professor @ Heriott-Watt University
17th December 2026 - A Sojourn Through the Interstellar Locker Looking for Planets (& More Around Distant Stars) | Dr Matthew Swayne, Post-Doctoral Researcher @ University of Glasgow
2027
28th January 2027 - The Universe: Reality or Simulation? | Prof Catherine Heymans, Astronomer Royal for Scotland @ Institute for Astronomy - University of Edinburgh
18th February 2027 - Members Night Talks
18th March 2027 - From Missing Matter and Gravitational Waves to a New Theory of Particle Physics | Dr Nils Hermannsonn-Truedsson, School of Physics & Astronomy @ University of Edinburgh
15th April 2027 - Pulsars - Celestial Lighthouses | Prof Declan Diver, School of Physics & Astronomy @ University of Glasgow
20th May 2027 - Astronomy in Twilight: Warm Summer Nights with Midges | Dr Andrew Conway, President @ The Astronomical Society of Glasgow
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Our public lecture for May 2026 will be held by Dr Adam Carnall.
The lecture will be held in room 641 of the Royal College Building at Strathclyde University, at 19:30pm.
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This months public lecture will be held by Dr. Anne-Marie Weijmans, Reader, School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St. Andrews, discussing "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey".
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been surveying the sky for over 20 years now. The survey started originally with a camera to image the sky with its telescope in New Mexico (United States), and then added spectrographs to measure the light distributions from stars, galaxies and quasars. In recent years, the survey expanded to the southern hemisphere, and even more recently, it started to add time-domain observations to its surveys, to monitor variable objects. In this talk I will discuss the history and technological developments of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, highlights of scientific discoveries, and what we can expect from SDSS in the next few years. And as SDSS was one of the first surveys to make their data freely publicly available, I will also showcase its data archive, and demonstrate how anyone who wants to take a look at a digital part of the sky can do so!
Dr Weijmans is a Reader in Astrophysics at the University of St Andrews, with a research focus on the structure and evolution of galaxies. She is the Data Products Manager for the fifth generation of Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS-V), where she is responsible for public data releases. Anne-Marie leads Shine, an interdisciplinary public engagement program that explores light and its use in astronomical research through science, art and music. She has developed and delivered several workshops on astronomy in primary and secondary schools, including at the Orkney Science Festival, and for the Royal Society of Edinburgh's school programme.
The lecture will be held in room 641 of the Royal College Building at Strathclyde University, at 19:30pm.
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The ACDM model has been the standard model of cosmology for nearly two decades. It is based on the idea that the Universe began with the Big Bang and has been expanding ever since. According to this model, about 95% of the Universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy - components whose physical nature remains unknown.
In this talk, Hong-Gang Yang will give a brief overview of how our understanding of the Universe has evolved, from the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers to modern cosmology. He will discuss how we arrived at a model in which most of the Universe is still mysterious, and what the future may hold for our attempts to understand it.
Hong-Gang is a PhD student in cosmology at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. His research focuses on understanding the large-scale structure of the Universe.
The lecture will take place at 19:30pm, in Room 641 of the Royal College Building at Strathclyde University.