Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture 2010

Michel Mayor, Professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Geneva, will give the lecture entitled, ‘The Amazing Diversity of Planetary Systems’.

Extrasolar planets have been assumed possible ever since the time of Copernicus, but detection of such planets has until recently been beyond the capability of observing technology.

The first confirmed observations were of extrasolar planets orbiting pulsars, a type of neutron star, and it was only in 1995 that Professor Mayor, with his colleague Didier Queloz, discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi.

Since then more than 450 extrasolar planets have been detected, confirming that that the Sun is not unique among stars in hosting planets and expanding the search for possible extraterrestrial life beyond our Solar System.

Professor Mayor has contributed to many of these discoveries and was one of a team of European scientists who in 2007 made the first detection of an extrasolar planet in a star's 'habitable zone'.

Professor Mayor was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal in 2004 and the Shaw Prize in Astronomy in 2005. He was very recently elected as a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

Andrew Chamblin (1969-2006) was a graduate of Rice University who moved to the UK as a graduate student. He spent a year at Christ Church, Oxford, and then moved to St John's College, Cambridge to take a PhD in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics under the joint supervision of Professors Gary Gibbons and Stephen Hawking.

He later became Draper Research Fellow at Pembroke College and then held post-doctoral appointments at University of California at Santa-Barbara, MIT, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Queen Mary College, University of London, before taking up an academic post at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

After his death, Andrew's family, friends and colleagues across the world have generously donated to a Fund in his memory. The Fund provides for an annual Andrew Chamblin Memorial Lecture at the University on a subject relevant to Andrew's life and work. The first three lectures have been given in 2007 by Stephen Hawking, in 2008 by Roger Penrose and in 2009 by Paul Davies.
 

The lecture will be held at 5:00pm in Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge and is free and open to all.