Dr Giorgia Busso talks about her work on the Gaia Mission at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge.
Dr Giorgia Busso is an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astronomy working on the European Space Agency’s Gaia space mission. Dr Busso is part of a small team at the University of Cambridge who processes the photometric and low resolution spectral data sent from Gaia. Launched in 2013, Gaia operates in an orbit around the Lagrange 2 (L2) point, located 1.5 million kilometres behind the Earth in the direction away from the Sun. The primary objective of Gaia is to measure stellar distances using the parallax method. To date, Gaia has catalogued around 2 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. This data helps astronomers to understand the formation history and evolution of our Galaxy.
The team in Cambridge is part of a wider international consortium of scientists working on the Gaia mission.
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The Spirit of Inquiry celebrates the 200th anniversary of the remarkable Cambridge Philosophical Society and brings to life the many remarkable episodes and illustrious figures associated with the Society, including Adam Sedgwick, Mary Somerville, Charles Darwin, and Lawrence Bragg.
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Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials. Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed. This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934. Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline. These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties. They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics.
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