JH Autumn Lecture - "A Small Unregarded Yellow Sun" - How did our solar system form, and how unusual is it?

Event Date: 30 September 2025

Join us for a talk by Dr. Kate Pattle about our unregarded Yellow Sun and find out if it is usual at all! The lecture is given at the Darwin Lecture Theatre at UCLan on 30 September at 6:30pm (refreshments from 6pm).

We often hear it said that our Sun is an ordinary, unexceptional star, but in fact, both it and our Solar System may be highly unusual. In this talk I will discuss what we understand about the still unsolved problem of how stars – both like our Sun and otherwise – form. I will show how astronomers use observations from Earth- and space-based telescopes to study both the clouds of dense gas that are the nurseries of new stars, and the discs around these stars which will one day evolve into solar systems that may be quite different from our own. I will discuss how common stars like our Sun and planets like the Earth may be, and the implications of this for the search for life on planets around other stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

Speaker biography

Kate Pattle is a Royal Society University Research Fellow at University College London. She gained her undergraduate degree at Oxford and her PhD at the University of Central Lancashire, and undertook postdoctoral work in Japan, Taiwan and Ireland before moving to UCL in 2021. Her research focusses on the role of magnetic fields in the star formation process.

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For more information look at the JHI Public Lecture website or email VPDebattista@uclan.ac.uk