“Dan?  Dan?  Dan? Dan? DAN? DAN? DAN? …” – Alan Partridge

The search for extra-terrestrial life isn’t exactly a success story. But our incessant desire to find some drives us to look. Wednesday night, a bunch of us crammed into Aberdeen’s Waterstones to hear UCL’s space scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock speak on the current chances of there being life “out there.”

Maggie’s main job in science has been in engineering satellites and telescopes – a talent she cultivated very early in her life. When she was 14 she built her own telescope, which was 150mm in diameter.

Besides The Clangers, she told us, this was her first real contact with space. Her enthusiasm and curiosity is inspiring. Recently awarded an MBE for her work in science communication, one of her outreach schemes takes school children on “Tours of the Universe”.

Luckily for us, then, our guide in our search for alien life had seen the universe, knew the sights, and even the lingo.

“I see myself as a translator, removing the jargon and highlighting the wonder” – she remarked in 2006, regarding her role as a recipient of the Science and Society Fellowship she holds at UCL.

Looking for life in the universe is, I imagine, a pretty arduous task. Since it’s a fairly big area to cover (billions of light-years), and getting bigger all the time, we might reasonably pose the question: where to start? (more…)

Solar researcher Dr Lucie Green from UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory gave an excellent Lunch Hour Lecture on Tuesday 29 November. The talk responded to conflicting reports in the popular press about the activity levels of the Sun, and sought to inspire the audience with an appreciation of the beauty and significance of solar phenomena.

It certainly wasn’t difficult to engage with this material on an aesthetic level. Coronal Mass Ejections, one of Dr Lucie Green’s specialities, were seen erupting magnificently from the surface of the Sun, and beautiful animated cutaways revealed the mechanisms taking place within.

It was emphasised that none of these were diagrams but visualisations of actual data. One became aware of the volume and variety of information being captured, and felt involved in its interpretation.

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Dr Lewis Dartnell (UCL Space & Climate Physics) is, in his own words, “paid to hunt for aliens”. Lucy Harper from the Society for Applied Microbiology went to his fascinating talk at the British Science Festival entitled, ‘Astrobiology – the hunt for alien life’.

ExoMars rover - phase B1 concept © ESA

We humans, and the billions of species we share the planet with, are protected from harmful radiation by the Earth’s magnetic field and a thick atmosphere.

But on other planets, such as Mars, radiation levels are much higher and these “Martian death rays” are damaging to life as we know it.

Dr Dartnell is trying to find out how long organisms can survive when exposed to this level of radiation.

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Since astronomers first glimpsed the surface of Mars through telescopes in the late 1900s, scientists have been fascinated by the idea that water – and along with it, the possibility of life – exists there. Dr Peter Grindrod (UCL Earth Sciences) gave this year’s Halstead Lecture at the British Science Festival to take the scientifically inclined on a whistle stop tour, complete with stunning images, of how our understanding of water on this mysterious planet has developed in the past 150 years.

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