AoT: The Cosmic Neighborhood Watch (Leiden, in English)

This Astronomy on Tap Leiden (AoT) will take place on Monday June 22nd at the Galerie Café Leidse Lente at 20:00 CEST. The speakers will be focusing on hidden worlds, from distant planets across the galaxy to the dim objects in our immediate cosmic backyard. As always, there will be two astronomy talks and fun games with which you can test your knowledge and try to win cool science prizes.

The speakers
Jo Ann Egger is a research fellow at the European Space Agency, where uses space- and ground-based telescopes to detect and characterise hidden exoplanets between Earth and Neptune in size, aiming to understand what we can learn about their interiors. Jo Ann's talk will focus on how we detect these hidden planets by watching stars wobble and flicker, and what these faint signals reveal about the surprising diversity of worlds across the galaxy.

Sam de Regt is a final year PhD student at Leiden Observatory, where he leverages different techniques to study the atmosphere of various types of stars including brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs are objects that bridge the gap between stars and giant planets. They are much heavier than Jupiter, but not massive enough to brightly shine like stars. Sam's talk will show us how observations with one of the world's largest telescopes allow us to analyse the composition of their atmospheres and uncover tiny chemical patterns in the emitted light. Those fingerprints turn out to hold surprising clues about where and when these neighbouring worlds formed.

Logistical information
The AoT starts at 20:00 sharp, so please arrive earlier to enter the café, save a seat, and grab a drink at the bar. The organisation uploads a recording of the talks on their YouTube channel. Galerie Café Leidse Lente is located at Haagweg 4 in Leiden. Payed parking is located at Haagweg 8.