On Thursday 6th October, FT Director Paul Roche spent a busy day at Bradfield College Near Reading. The day started with a talk on “Living in Space” to around 100 children from local state primary schools. Paul talked to the children about the problems of living in orbit, using pictures and videos from Tim Peake’s recent 6 month stay on the International Space Station.

Later in the afternoon, around twenty 6th form physics students from Bradfield College and nearby Theale Green High School took part in a workshop on stellar evolution. To follow this they worked thorugh some of the new FT educational resources developed to support the Gaia Alerts project which can be found here. These activities focus on supernovae which are massive explosions that mark the end of a star’s life.

The day finished with a lecture to the entire 6th form of Bradfield College, where Paul talked about the role of “Impacts from Space“, and in particular the mass extinction of the dinosaurs around 66 million years ago. Images of asteroids and comets obtained with the Faulkes Telescopes helped to illustrate the work that schools and amateur astronomers have done over the years.

You can have a go at working with asteroids yourself using the resources found here.