Orbit, Spin and Chaos

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 9th October 2025 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Meeting Room

After the giant planet instability, the giant planets’ orbits kept spreading out ever so slightly due to planetesimal-driven migration. Meanwhile, the rocky planets finished their formation; during their “late accretion”, they continued to be bombarded for a billion years but at a rate that slowed in time.

For the past four or more billion years the planets have all been on roughly the same orbits as their present-day ones. It may seem boring, but this doesn’t mean nothing happens.

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Speaker: Rod Hine

About Rod Hine.

Born just after the war, I was about ten when my Aunt Florrie gave me a book for Christmas. It was “The Boys Book of Space” by Patrick Moore. I was already interested in anything to do with science and engineering and I devoured the book from cover to cover. Shortly afterwards, Sputnik I was launched and seeing it pass over London clinched my interest in physics and space travel. Pretty soon I was deeply involved in electronics and amateur radio. I passed the RAE in 1962 and later took the call-sign G8AQH.

I took physics, chemistry and maths at A-level and in 1964 went up to Churchill College, Cambridge to study Natural Sciences. I later switched to Electrical Sciences and after graduating I joined Marconi at Chelmsford working for several years on satellite communications. That job eventually took me to Nairobi, Kenya after which I worked there in Meteorological communications and later switched to teaching at the Kenya Polytechnic. In 1972 I married a Yorkshire lass I had met in Nairobi and we finally moved back to UK in 1976.

Since then I have had a variety of jobs in electronics and industrial controls. I was a co-founder of Bradford Instruments Limited which designed and supplied industrial control systems from 1982 and only finished trading in 2012. From about 2000 I have been lecturing part-time at University of Bradford although I now seem to have been retired as the Electrical Engineering Department has been wound right down. I got back into astronomy around 1992 when Josie bought me an astronomy book and I joined Bradford Astronomical Society. I’m currently Chairman of BAS, mostly because no-one else is prepared to do the job!

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