Water in space:

A keynote lecture:  Water in space: from interstellar clouds to planets will be presented by Professor Ewine van Dishoeck, Professor of Molecular Astrophysics at the University of Leiden who is the keynote speaker at the OU’s Faculty of Science’s Compositional Universe event.

Professor van Dishoeck will discuss the fact that water is a key molecule in the physics and chemistry of regions in which new stars and planets are born. Thanks to recent new observational developments, especially the Herschel Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope, a comprehensive set of data on water gas and ice has been obtained toward a large sample of well-characterized protostars, covering a wide range of masses and luminosities -from the lowest to the highest mass protostars-, as well as evolutionary stages -from the earliest stages represented by pre-stellar cores to the late stages represented by the pre-main sequence stars surrounded only by disks.  Special attention will be paid to the close interaction between laboratory experiments, molecular dynamics simulations and astronomical data on water.  New insight into the origin of the water in oceans on Earth comes from observations of deuterated water. Future prospects for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) are discussed as well.