Milton Keynes Astronomical Society

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic this Astromeet is being held online using Zoom.
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The Richard Lambert Memorial Lecture is an annual talk commissioned by the Milton Keynes Astronomy Society in the memory of its founder Richard Lambert.

This year's lecture entitled 'Diamonds in the Sky' explores the importance of White Dwarfs in Modern Astrophysics. White dwarfs are the used to describe stars when they reach the end of their long evolutions. These are smaller stars typically with a mass of up to eight times as massive as our own sun.

These ancient stars are incredibly dense. A teaspoonful of their matter would weigh as much on Earth as an elephant (5.5 tons). White dwarfs typically have a radius just .01 times that of our own sun, but their mass is about the same. Stars like our sun fuse hydrogen in their cores into helium. White dwarfs are stars that have burned up all of the hydrogen they once used as nuclear fuel. Fusion in a star's core produces heat and outward pressure, but this pressure is kept in balance by the inward push of gravity generated by a star's mass. When the hydrogen used as fuel vanishes, and fusion slows, gravity causes the star to collapse in on itself.

Scientists have theorised that the dense stellar core white dwarf can become so cold that its carbon has crystallized, effectively forming a diamond the size of Earth.
For more background, go to: Cold Dead Star May Be a Giant Diamond and White Dwarfs

Presented by Professor Martin Barstow

Professor Barstow is Pro-Vice-Chancellor Strategic Science Projects, Director at the Leicester Institute of Space and Earth Observation and Professor of Astrophysics and Space Science, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester.

Degrees - BA Physics (York) 1979, Ph.D. Physics (Leicester) 1983.

Professor Barstow has a strong background in the analysis of X-ray, EUV, UV, optical and infrared data from white dwarfs. White Dwarfs are the end of the evolutionary stage of stars like our Sun after a lifetime of fusing their Hydrogen stores into Helium. He has been involved in numerous projects described by the various acronyms: GO (IUE, EXOSAT, ROSAT, VOYAGER, EUVE, ASCA, HST, FUSE, GALEX), Archival (EUVE, IUE, Einstein, EXOSAT, FUSE, HST), Instrumentation (ROSAT, J-PEX, WSO, GAIA). All the projects are Space Observatories which have access to frequencies blocked by our atmosphere.

Complementing this has been an active programme of theoretical studies of the white dwarf atmospheres and the interstellar medium.
For more background, go to: About Professor Martin Barstow

Milton Keynes Astronomical Society has been meeting remotely since June as public assemblies are not allowed under COVID-19 rules at our usual venue at Rectory Cottages, Bletchley. We are sticking to the framework of our disrupted programme as much as we can and guest speakers are happy to present their talks remotely.
We have decided to open our virtual meetings to visitors as our physical meetings were before this crisis flared up. Same rules apply with 2 meetings permitted before we ask you to consider membership.