Astronomy on Tap Leiden: The Sun and Stars

We are very excited for our next event, which will take place on Monday, April 13th at Culture Café Leidse Lente at 20:00 CET!

This month, we will be focusing on stars, from our own Sun to the distant lights that twinkle in the night sky. Andy To will talk about how humans through history have studied the Sun’s activity, while, and Paul Cristofari will take us beyond the solar system to explain how astronomers characterize other stars.

As always, there will be fun games with which you can test your knowledge and try to win cool science prizes!

Andy To:“Solar Activity Through the Eyes of Our Ancestors”

Andy To is a Research Fellow at the European Space Agency, where he investigates the warning signs of solar flares before they start, with the goal of improving our ability to predict flares and space weather events. His talk will focus on how humans studied the Sun’s activity before the space age. How did our ancestors record unusual solar activity, and what traces has the Sun left on our world over the past hundred, thousand, or even ten thousand years? His talk will explore how the Sun influences our modern society by investigating historical observations and even natural archives such as ice cores and tree rings.

Paul Cristofari:“Looking beyond the Sun: the stars that shape other worlds”

Paul Cristofari is a postdoctoral research at Leiden Observatory, where he leverages high-resolution spectroscopy to study stars of various types, with a particular focus on small stars called red dwarfs. Paul’s talk will take us beyond the Sun, the one star we cannot miss, to tell us about how we study distant stars by reading the light that they emit. His talk will focus on some of the smallest stars, known as red dwarfs, which can be just as temperamental as our Sun: they too may influence life on the planets that orbit them.

Logistical information: We start at 20:00 sharp, so please arrive earlier to enter the venue, save a seat, and grab a drink at the bar. We will be uploading a recording of the talks on our YouTube channel after the event.

Join us for an evening of astronomy and fun games where you can win cool science prizes! All ages and backgrounds are welcome!

For more information check out https://aot.strw.leidenuniv.nl/