A&G Highlights Meeting - April 2025, Hybrid

The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), founded in 1820, encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science.

Royal Astronomical Society

Royal Irish Academy

A&G Highlights Meeting Programme - April 11th 2025 16:00 Prof Mark Lester (Senior Secretary)Welcome and Announcements16:05 Dr Laura Hayes (Dublin Institute for Advanced Study)Chasing Solar Storms: Solar Orbiter and the Active Sun, Five Years OnFive years into its journey, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter mission is delivering transformative insights into the physics of our active Sun. Designed to observe the Sun both up close and from unique vantage points out of the ecliptic, the mission is capturing stunning images and revealing new details about the processes that drive solar activity. As we approach solar maximum, Solar Orbiter is observing flares, coronal mass ejections, and solar wind structures in extraordinary detail, while also measuring their in-situ effects in the heliosphere. In this talk, I’ll highlight recent discoveries - including high-resolution observations of eruptive events and glimpses of the Sun’s polar regions - and discuss how the mission is helping to answer fundamental questions in solar and heliospheric physics, from the origins of the solar wind to the mechanisms behind solar storms that can impact Earth.Dr. Laura A. Hayes is a Royal Society-Science Foundation Ireland University Research Fellow based at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS). Her research focuses on high-energy processes in the solar atmosphere, particularly solar flares and their role in driving space weather. She completed her Ph.D. at Trinity College Dublin in 2018, and subsequently held research positions at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the European Space Agency (ESA).16:35 Prof Peter Gallagher (Dublin Institute for Advanced Study) The Causes and Consequences of Solar StormsThe Sun is an active star that varies in activity over timescales of approximately 11 years. During solar maximum, large sunspot groups can develop that produce solar flares and coronal mass ejections. These energetic phenomena can accelerate particles and magnetised plasma that can cause geomagnetic storms and auroral displays at Earth. In May and October 2025, two very different solar eruptions resulted in geomagnetic activity and auroral displays that were observed across Ireland, the UK and other mid-latitude locations. In this talk, I will review the causes and consequences of solar storms and the terrestrial activity that they can produce using these two well-observed periods of solar and geomagnetic activity.Professor Gallagher is Director of DIAS Dunsink Observatory and Adjunct Professor at Trinity College Dublin. He is head of the Irish LOFAR project at Birr Castle and is involved in numerous ESA and NASA space missions to study the sun and space weather. He graduated with a B.Sc. from University College Dublin and an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. from Queen's University Belfast, and was a Research Fellow at Owens Valley Solar Array and Big Bear Solar Observatory in California and at NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre.17:00 Dr Johanna Vos (Trinity College Dublin)Exometeorology: Weather on Worlds Beyond our OwnMajor technological advances have enabled the discovery of a small number of directly imaged exoplanets. These imaged worlds can be studied in far greater detail than exoplanets detected by indirect methods such as transit and radial velocity techniques. Next-generation telescopes such as the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming 30-m telescopes (e.g. ELT, TMT, GMT) will enable direct exoplanet characterisation. Based on the handful of exoplanets studied to date, it is clear that interpretation of future observational data hinges on a thorough understanding of their atmospheric processes. In this talk I will discuss our past, current and future efforts to investigate the atmospheres of extrasolar worlds. In particular, I will discuss how a combination of observational and computational techniques will reveal three critical atmospheric processes: clouds, winds and aurorae. Each of these processes are well-studied in our own Solar System and we can now begin to study them on worlds beyond our own.Dr Johanna Vos is an Associate Professor in Astrophysics and a Royal Society - Research Ireland University Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. Her research makes use of world-class telescope facilities to reveal the atmospheres of worlds beyond the solar system, and is funded by the Royal Society, Research Ireland and the European Research Council. She received her undergraduate degree from Trinity College Dublin and her PhD in Astronomy from the University of Edinburgh. After her PhD she spent 5 years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History before returning to Ireland to establish her own research group. Passionate about supporting underrepresented minorities in science, she has worked alongside organisations including NASA, The Planetary Society and Stemettes on a variety of mentorship, outreach and citizen science programs.17:30 Dr David Murphy (University College, Dublin)CubeSats for Gamma-ray AstronomyCubeSats are miniature satellites which come in a range of standarised shapes and sizes. The smallest ones, known as 1U, are a cube with a side of 10cm and weigh approximately 1kg. Initially proposed as an educational tool and long considered a curiosity, in the past decade these spacecraft have demonstrated a genuine utility for commercial and research purposes. Their standardised format and increasingly available off-the-shelf components have made space accessible to universities and research groups.At the same time, instrumentation for gamma-ray astronomy has been undergoing a revolution in miniaturisation with silicon sensors replacing vacuum tubes and application-specific integrated circuits replacing large circuit boards. Several CubeSats carrying gamma-ray instruments have recently been launched and successfully demonstrated that such small spacecraft can produce scientific results. One such CubeSat is EIRSAT-1 which reached orbit on December 1st 2023 becoming Ireland’s first satellite.With the core concept now proven, researchers around the world are working on the next generation of gamma-ray CubeSat missions including COMCUBE-S, a proposed swarm of satellites, each carrying a Compton telescope, a sophisticated gamma-ray detector based on the principle of Compton scattering. Few examples of this type of detector have ever flown in space. COMCUBE-S proposes to launch approximately 30 of these detectors on 16U CubeSats which can operate as a single instrument simultaneously observing the whole sky.David Murphy is a Research Fellow in the Space Science group at the University College Dublin Centre for Space Research. In 2017, as a PhD student, David submitted a proposal to the European Space Agency for EIRSAT-1, a miniature satellite that would be built by students in UCD. Following acceptance of the proposal, David served as systems engineer for the project with overall responsibility for the design of the spacecraft and its payloads, in particular the novel gamma-ray detector, GMOD, which was the subject of his PhD thesis. David currently manages operations for EIRSAT-1, is coordinator for UCD’s new Spacecraft Operations module, and is PI of the COMCUBE-S project which is undergoing a Phase-A review with the European Space Agency. 17:55 Prof Mark Lester (Senior Secretary)Closing Remarks

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A&G Highlights Meeting - April 2025, Hybrid

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