Mysterious material in between the stars

Guest Speaker

Thursday, 21st August 2025 (19:45 - 22:00)

Venue: Hybrid

Across the vast swathe of interstellar space exist long streaks of organic material of uncertain origin and even less certain composition. Astronomers have been studying these “diffuse interstellar bands”, or DIBs, for decades and recent discoveries have provided new clues to what they are made of. Now, astronomers have found them all around the Solar System. And that’s quite surprising.
The Solar System is located in the so-called Local Bubble, a cavity in the interstellar medium (ISM). It’s a region 300 light-years across with a density of about one-tenth of the regular ISM. It contains a lot of hot gas, heated to millions of degrees, creating conditions too harsh for your standard interstellar molecules.

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Speaker: Jacco Van Loon

I was born in a small village in The Netherlands, near Arnhem. After my primary and secondary education in Alkmaar I went on to study Astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam. This is also where I obtained my Ph.D., in 1999, after having spent the first two years at the European Southern Observatory Headquarters near Munich in Germany. Then I got married, spent two years in Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher, and in 2001 took up a lectureship at Keele University where I got promoted to Reader in 2008.