"Seeing the Aftermath of Colliding Planets and Shattered Moons" with Matthew Kenworthy

If you look at enough stars in the night sky, it is possible to see even very rare astronomical events: astronomers look at hundreds of millions of stars every night to see if they change brightness, and in the process we have not only discovered thousands of planets orbiting around other stars, but have also seen the results of collisions of exoplanets too.

I’ll talk about how I helped discover what we think is a planetary collision in a nearby star system, how we found it, and what it means for our understanding of how planets form and are occasionally destroyed, and we we can find out with new telescopes in the neat future.

Bio:
Matthew Kenworthy was born and raised in Epsom, just southwest of London. Despite the light pollution there, he obtained his PhD in astrophysics at Cambridge before working in the American desert in Tucson, Arizona on giant telescopes for over a decade. He specialises in looking for exoplanets - planets around other stars in our Galaxy - and now works in the Netherlands in the small college town of Leiden. Fun fact: he once had his left foot run over by Stephen Hawking.