PhD Colloquium: Katherine Blundell (U. of Oxford)

Our Galaxy is a dynamic place, teeming with interactions, close encounters and explosions. In this seminar, the speaker will describe how transient signals of these activities may be detected, measured and understood, and how remarkable structures have emerged from turbulent times. It will be defined and discussed spectroscopy and illustrate what a powerful tool in the toolkit it is to explore dynamic behaviour in the Galaxy, both in terms of extreme orbital paths as well as explosions and ejections. The Global Jet Watch will be introduced, which is the means by which “time-lapse” spectroscopy can be obtained for various research endeavours, and show how these elucidate particle acceleration in relativistic jets, jet launch from nova explosions, circumbinary orbiting matter and star-star interactions during their “flypast” at their periastron.