Where do the elements come from?
A special talk by Oxford speaker Dr James Herbert Gillanders.
About the talk
Most of the elements in the Universe are produced by stars, either through stable production processes during their lives, or via more instantaneous and extreme processes during their explosive deaths. In this talk I will give an overview of stellar explosions, how we exploit a range of techniques to find and observe them, and how we measure which elements they produce.
About the speaker
I am a postdoctoral researcher based in the Astrophysics department at the University of Oxford. My research primarily focuses on studying the properties of merging neutron star systems, which are responsible for producing many of the heaviest elements in the Universe (including platinum, gold and uranium). More recently, my research has expanded into exploiting observational techniques to help find and identify these, and other (e.g., supernovae), extreme explosive transient events.