Monthly Meeting – The Vera C. Rubin Observatory: The Greatest movie ever made!

Tonight’s talk will be given by Dr Verma Aprajita.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will revolutionise our understanding of the Universe in numerous ways. Its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), with an unprecedented combination of areal coverage and sensitivity, will make the first 10-year movie of the sky. Among its science goals, LSST will open new scientific endeavours in the transient Universe, the study of our own galaxy out to some of the first galaxies formed less than 1 bn years after the Big Bang and constrain fundamental parameters of the Universe. In this talk, I will describe the Vera C. Rubin telescope and its survey with some of the amazing science we can expect to learn with this revolutionary telescope.

Aprajita Verma is a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford. She is Project Scientist for the UK Extremely Large Telescope Programme and In-kind Program Coordinator for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. After completing her PhD and a short post-doc in the Astrophysics Group at Imperial College (London, UK), Aprajita was science research staff at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Garching, Germany), and subsequently joined the Sub-department of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford. Her research interests cover a wide range of extragalactic topics, including dust obscured star-forming and black hole hosting galaxies, high-redshift (distant) galaxies and strong gravitational lenses. She is a founding member and co-lead of ‘Space Warps’ , the Zooniverse Citizen Science project to find gravitational lenses.

There will be a break after the talk and then an astronomy news update from Gordon Ewen.

This talk will be free for members. Non members can contact the society if they wish to attend.