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Didcot Café Scientifique – Dr Chris Pearson “The Life of an Atom”
September 16 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Event Navigation
Have you ever wondered where the carbon in our bodies, the oxygen in the air or the gold in your jewellery come from?
The people and things we see around us mark the end of a long journey of constant recycling and reincarnation. Everyone has probably seen the new-age car bumper sticker “We are all made of Stardust” and it’s true that at some point in the past of cosmic history, our atoms were forged in the hearts of stars. However, that isn’t quite the origin story and this talk will take us on a journey from the earliest cosmic times to the present.
Everything we see around us was originally created in its simplest form, a Hydrogen atom, in the creation event, the Big Bang, at the start of the Universe at the beginning of time. From this point, these simple particles have journeyed through space and time, undergoing a metamorphosis that has resulted in the world that we see around us and human beings themselves.
Date: Tuesday 16th September
Time: 19:30 – 21:00
Venue: Cornerstone Arts Centre, Didcot
Cost: £4.50 (Under 18s free)
Speaker Biography:
Dr Chris Pearson is head of Astronomy at RAL Space on Harwell Campus. His PhD was in “Galaxy Evolution and Cosmology” with Prof. Michael Rowan-Robinson at Imperial College, London, and has worked on large galaxy surveys for both ground-based telescopes and space-borne missions.
He worked for 7 years in Japan on the AKARI space telescope before moving to the UK to RAL Space to work on the SPIRE instrument on the Herschel Space Observatory where he led the team that produced all the nice images from the mission.
He now works on the ARIEL mission searching for exoplanets and the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, the largest scientific facility ever to be built.
