Didcot Cafe Scientifique - Dr Chris Pearson The Life of an Atom

Have you ever wondered where the carbon in our bodies, the oxygen in the air or the gold in your jewellery come from?

The people and things we see around us such as our friends, our food and our phones mark the end of a long journey of constant recycling and reincarnation. Everyone has probably seen the new-age car bumper sticker “We are all made of Stardust” and it is true that at some point in the past of cosmic history, our atoms were forged in the hearts of stars. However, that isn’t quite the origin story and this talk will take us on a journey from the earliest cosmic times to the present. Everything we see around us was originally created in its simplest form, a Hydrogen atom,  in the creation event, the Big Bang, at the start of the Universe at the beginning of time. From this point, these simple particles have journeyed through space and time, undergoing a metamorphosis that has resulted in the world that we see around us and human beings themselves. We are the Universe manifest, trying to figure itself out.

Biography:

Dr Chris Pearson is head of Astrophysics at RAL Space on the Harwell campus. His PhD was in “Galaxy Evolution and Cosmology” with Prof. Michael Rowan-Robinson at Imperial, London and has worked on large galaxy surveys for both ground based telescopes and space borne missions. He worked for 7 years in Japan on the AKARI space telescope before moving to the UK to RAL Space to work on the Herschel Space Observatory where he led the team that produced all the nice images from the mission. He now works on the ARIEL mission searching for alien worlds and the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, the largest scientific facility ever to be built.