Lecture - Professor Patrick Irwin - Uranus and Neptune - The solar system’s "Ice Giants"

Summary

Uranus and Neptune, orbiting the outer regions of the solar system are both four times larger than the Earth and roughly 16 times more massive. They are cold, dark, mysterious worlds that are very difficult to study from the Earth. In this talk I will show how our understanding of these planets’ atmospheres has been transformed by advances in ground-based telescopes and also the advent of space-based telescopes such as Hubble and most recently James Webb, and I will present new observations and discoveries.

Biography

I'm a University Lecturer in this department, working on remote sensing of planetary atmospheres. I have been a co-investigator on a number of spacecraft missions, such as Cassini/CIRS, Venus Express/VIRTIS and Rosetta/VIRTIS and I'm also involved with ground-based observations of the giant planets with telescopes such as IRTF, Gemini, UKIRT and VLT. My main research interests at present are the study of the gas giants, especially the ice giants (Uranus and Neptune) and also exoplanets.