Effects of Astronomical Phenomena on Earth - Coryn Bailer-Jones [29 Jan, 2016]
Channel: IUCAA SciPOP
Date: 2017-07-12

Friday - January 29, 2016, 6:00 p.m.
Chandrasekhar Auditorium, IUCAA
S. P. Pune University Campus

Dr. Coryn Bailer-Jones 
Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany

The extraterrestrial environment obviously has a significant impact on the Earth: the day-night cycle is caused by the Earth's rotation, and the seasons arise from the Earth's orbit about the Sun. But what other astronomical phenomena affect the Earth?

In this non-technical talk, Dr. Bailer-Jones will look into some of the other mechanisms of change, such as solar activity, long-term changes in the Earth's orbit, nearby supernovae, and asteroid and comet impacts. In particular he will ask what level of threat these present to life and human civilization on Earth.

Bio: Coryn Bailer-Jones has a physics degree from the University of Oxford (1993) and a PhD from the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University (1996). His work was on stellar classification together with Mike Irwin, Ted von Hippel, and Gerry Gilmore. He has also been a postdoc within the Inferential Sciences Group at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he worked on the modelling of materials processing with David Mackay. In 1998 he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Astronomie (MPIA) in Heidelberg to work primarily on brown dwarfs with Reinhard Mundt. In 2003 and 2010 he was a visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and Harvard University respectively. Coryn is now a staff member at MPIA, where he leads the work within the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium on source classification and estimation of astrophysical parameters. His main scientific interests are learning from astronomical surveys, statistical inference, Galactic structure, and the impact of astronomical phenomena on the Earth. He also teaches in the Physics and Astronomy department at the University of Heidelberg.

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