Lecture
This Week's Discoveries | 25 February 2020
- Date
- Tuesday 25 February 2020
- Time
- Location
-
Oort
Niels Bohrweg 2
2333 CA Leiden - Room
- De Sitterzaal
First lecture
Title
Future material demand for electric vehicle batteries
Speaker
Bernhard Steubing (CML)
Bernhard Steubing is an assistant professor at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) and focusses on environmental assessment of future technologies using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and related methods.
Second lecture
Title
Stellar systems at low radio frequencies: The discovery of radio exoplanets
Speaker
Joe Callingham (Leiden Observatory)
Joe is an Australian astrophysicist based at Leiden University, where he is a Veni Fellow. He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney and just finished a de Bruyn Fellowship at ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. He specialises in studying radio stars, exoplanets, and the evolution of galaxies. He also enjoys surfing, independent cinema, running, reading, and anything to do with science-fiction.
Abstract
One key question that astronomy is attempting to answer is whether there are habitable planets around stars other than our Sun. While we have entered an era where identifying nearby exoplanets has become standard, discerning whether the environmental conditions dictated by the host stars are suitable for life has proved far more elusive. The detection of radio emission from an exoplanet provides a direct probe of the planet's magnetic field - information crucial for assessing the potential habitability of the planet. However, it is only with the recent development of sophisticated megahertz-frequency sensitive telescopes, such as the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR), that a search for the faint radio exoplanetary emission is now possible. In this talk, I will outline our LOFAR survey of stellar systems, with a focus on our recent detection of strong, highly circularly polarised low-frequency radio emission associated with nearby stars - the expected signpost of a star-exoplanet interaction.