The Costa Blanca Astronomical Society are pleased to announce that Professor Emma Bunce of the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, will visit the Costa Blanca to give a public talk.

Professor Emma Bunce OBE is the Director of the Institute for Space at the University of Leicester, and was President of the Royal Astronomical Society from 2020 to 2022. She is a planetary scientist involved in multiple space missions exploring our solar system including Cassini at Saturn, Juno at Jupiter, BepiColombo at Mercury, and the future JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission to Ganymede. She uses data from these missions to answer fundamental questions about these diverse solar system objects. She has received multiple awards in recognition of her work, the most recent of which is an OBE for “Services to Astronomy and Science Education” in the King’s New Year’s Honours List in 2023.

The subject of her talk to the Costa Blanca Astronomical Society, is Exploring Ocean Worlds.

After just a few decades of space exploration with robotic spacecraft, we now have tantalising evidence that deep oceans of liquid water exist beneath the icy crusts of moons and dwarf planets in our solar system. This raises the question of the potential habitability of these extra-terrestrial environments, as life as we know it depends on the presence of liquid water. Two of the Galilean moons in the Jupiter system, Europa and Ganymede, are thought to harbour such underground oceans. Prof Bunce is part of the project team for this mission.

The talk will be given in English, and is open to anyone interested the subject and is on Saturday 17th May at the Beniarbeig Auditorium (google the name for directions) starting at 19:00. There is no entrance fee, and the theatre is large, so there is no need to reserve a seat.