Please note: this is a free and open to the public in-person only event at Burlington House repeating at 6pm, 7pm, and 8pm. Please register via the Eventbrite link below.
We invite you to come join us in celebration of our 150th anniversary of being at Burlington House.
The Royal Astronomical Society was founded in 1820 at Freemason's Tavern and where we held our meetings at 57 Lincoln's Inn Fields until 1834. After 40 years at Somerset House we moved into Burlington House in 1874 and are happy to say that we have recently agreed to a 999-year lease to stay on these historical premises. Learn more about the history of the RAS here.
Please come and join us for an Open Late on 28 June to hear from our new RAS President Professor Mike Lockwood on the natural solar event that caused the brilliant aurora, with reports of it reaching as far as Southampton, in May 2024. More information and to register below.
Three sessions will be offered at:
- 6pm - 20 minute talk with 10 minute Q&A followed by a library exhibit.
- 7pm - 20 minute talk with 10 minute Q&A followed by a library exhibit.
- 8pm - 20 minute talk with 10 minute Q&A followed by a library exhibit.
And on display in our library, you will find:
- The only surviving observations of the most spectacular solar flare ever witnessed, now known as the Carrington Event.
- More unique space weather and sunspot observations from the RAS Archives by John Herschel and other astronomers.
- The RAS Bicentennial patchwork quilt, which depicts aurora and solar eclipses among other phenomena.
What was the great auroral display of May 2024 all about?
This month we got the chance to see aurora in the UK, in an event that comes around about once a decade. We were lucky, it happened after dark but not in the small hours when most people are asleep, or when it was cloudy or during a full moon. Aurora occurs in rings around the Earth's magnetic poles and in Europe is normally over northern Scandinavia - but sometimes the ring (called the auroral oval) expands to bring it down to over the UK. In exceptional events, like that last month, it even reaches down to southern Europe. Aurora is powered by energy that Earth's magnetic field extracts from the solar wind - a supersonoic outflow of charged particles that all stars emit - and that is highly variable , sometimes being enhanced in huge eruptions of material called Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), a few of which hit the Earth. It is all to do with the magnetic field of the Sun, which is relatively simple and ordered at sunspot minimum but gets increasingly tangled as the Sun heads towards sunspot maximum - we can see this in images of the solar atmosphere during eclipses. CME eruptions are part of the way that the field untangles itself and so help the Sun return to solar minimum again, the whole cycle taking eleven years on average: the progress of that cycle often being monitored by the number of sunspots on the solar surface. We study these processes, not only so we can forecast beautiful auroral displays, but mainly so we can protect operational systems, such as satellites, power grids and pipelines from the damage that these events can cause.
About our speaker:
Mike Lockwood is our new RAS president and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has studied the various ways that the Sun influences Earth, work he started with his PhD at Exeter University and the continued working at Auckland University, New Zealand, RAE, Farnborough, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, NASA, UNIS Svalbard, Southampton University and now the University of Reading. He has studied the Sun, interplanetary space, near-Earth space and the aurora and has a particular interest in how these phenomena effect life on Earth and humankind's operational systems.
This event is in-person only and will take place at Burlington House, Piccadilly, London at the Royal Astronomical Society.