Christmas Lecture by Dr. Alexandra Thompson

Fantastic Worlds and How to find them by Dr. Alexandra Thompson

Alexandra Park School would like to welcome you to this years Christmas Lecture.

Fantastic Worlds and How to Find Them

Join us to take a tour of the weird and wonderful planets that we have discovered outside of our own solar system – ‘exoplanets’. We’ll ‘lift-off’ with the history of these distant worlds to date including how many we have discovered, how we find them, what we currently understand about them and how they differ from our local neighbours orbiting the Sun. Over the course of our voyage we’ll also stop off at some of the strangest, most unimaginably alien worlds, many of which are so extreme that even science fiction couldn’t predict them. Finally, we’ll ‘land’ with an overview of what some of the science goals of the exoplanet field in the near future are.

Who is Dr Alexandra Thompson?

Dr Alexandra Thompson is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Exoplanet Group at University College London (UCL) funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). She’s a consortium member of ESA’s future exoplanet-dedicated space mission Ariel which is set to launch at the end of the decade. Her research focuses on understanding not just the planets themselves but also the stars they orbit, many of which are very different to our own Sun. Her interest in outreach is partially motivated by the unconventional route that she took into academia, originally working as a tattoo artist prior to focusing on astrophysics full-time.

Please join us for refreshments from 5pm. The talk will begin at 5.30pm

On the night we will be collecting for the hardship fund, please donate as generously as possible. We now have a contactless card reader!