A&G Highlights Meeting Programme
March 13th 2026
16:00 Prof Mike Lockwood (President)
Welcome and Announcements
16:05 Dr John Coxon (Northumbria University)
" Hemispheric asymmetries in terrestrial electrodynamics"
Coxon et al. (2016) demonstrated that there is an asymmetry in Birkeland currents between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. I will outline why such an asymmetry was contrary to expectations, how the asymmetry has manifested in subsequent datasets and studies, and discuss the reasons that such an asymmetry may occur at Earth.
Dr John Coxon (Northumbria University)
John Coxon is an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow at Northumbria University and won the Fowler Award in 2025. His research interests are primarily in terrestrial electrodynamics: he studies electric current systems that flow at Earth, including the Birkeland currents. He has also contributed to the question of substorm physics, including work in how energy and currents are distributed before and after substorm onset.
16:35 Prof Mark Lester (University of Leicester)
“Chance Observations with a Meteor Scatter Radar”
Using radars to investigate meteors and their trails began after the second world war. Such dedicated systems are now deployed at many locations around the globe. In this presentation I shall talk about two unexpected events which resulted in observations with a meteor radar in Finland.
Prof Mark Lester (University of Leicester)
Currently RAS Senior Secretary.
17:00 Eddington Lecture
Dr Kareem El-Badry (California Institute of Technology)
“Black holes and revelations: unseen companions in stellar binaries”
The Milky Way contains of order 100 million stellar-mass black holes. Yet, fewer than 100 black hole candidates are known in the Milky Way, and only about 25 are dynamically confirmed. Our view of the black hole population has been shaped almost entirely by observations of X-ray binaries and gravitational wave sources, both of which represent rare outcomes of binary evolution. I will discuss recent efforts to uncover the much larger population of Galactic black holes in non-interacting binaries, focusing particularly on astrometry from the Gaia mission. Compared to previous surveys, Gaia is revealing post-interaction binaries in wider orbits, whose properties are difficult to explain with standard binary evolution models. I will discuss how the Gaia catalogs can be leveraged for statistical inference, despite their complex selection function, and how they can discriminate between competing formation models.
Dr Kareem El-Badry (California Institute of Technology)
Kareem El-Badry is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on binary stars, black holes, and unusual outcomes of stellar evolution, combining large-scale surveys, targeted observations, and stellar modeling to understand how stars and compact objects form and evolve. He earned his Ph.D. in astrophysics from UC Berkeley in 2021 and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics before joining Caltech in 2023. He also holds an adjunct appointment at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, where he has been a frequent visitor since 2016.
17:55 Prof Mike Lockwood (President)
Closing Remarks