Just like the Earth, the Moon is about 4.5 billion years old. It has been and continues to be constantly bombarded by meteorites. Some suggest that this rate of bombardment has remained constant in the past couple of billion years. The Moon's surface without any substantial atmosphere or tectonic activity serves as a time capsule, helping us detangle Earth's history. The only way to see if the bombardment rate has changed is to have an age for every single crater, an extremely difficult task using traditional crater dating methods.

For decades NASA has been sending orbiters, landers and rovers to Mars for research and exploration, and the agency is aiming to send humans to the Red Planet in the 2030s. Professor John Moores provides an overview of our past, present and future missions to Mars. Chronicles of a Peculiar Universe is a series of talks presented in collaboration with York University's Faculty of Science. Note: Speaker was previously Professor Robin Metcalfe who is not able present due to unforeseen circumstances. We apologize for any disappointment.

See http://www.windows2universe.org/citizen_science/starcount/

Watch the recorded video: https://youtu.be/RTeEyn0VG3k

Quasars are the brightest objects in our Universe and are formed when matter spirals into supermassive black holes. They contain rotating disks as big as our solar system and hotter than the Sun. Professor Patrick Hall discusses these fascinating objects and how they tap the strong gravity of black holes. Chronicles of a Peculiar Universe is a series of talks presented in collaboration with York University's Faculty of Science.

Watch the live stream of Matt Russo's talk “Harmony of the Rings” at 8:00pm https://www.youtube.com/c/SYSTEMSounds

Showtimes: 7:00pm, 8:00pm, 9:00pm

Although we are still decades away from discovering life on worlds outside of our own solar system, much progress is being made today to identify the best potential candidates for hosting such life. In this talk Ryan Cloutier will discuss what we currently know about these so-called exoplanets and how we know it. He will then highlight the steps that will be taken in the not-so-distant future to further our understanding of exoplanetary atmospheres and potentially even their surface conditions using extreme telescopes.

Observations of the microwave background, the left-over heat from the big bang, are snapshots of the universe only three hundred thousand years after the big bang. These observations have answered many of the questions that have driven cosmology for the past few decades: How old is the universe? What is its size and shape? What is the composition of the universe? How do galaxies emerge?

Just like the Earth, the Moon is about 4.5 billion years old. It has been and continues to be constantly bombarded by meteorites. Some suggest that this rate of bombardment has remained constant in the past couple of billion years. The Moon's surface without any substantial atmosphere or tectonic activity serves as a time capsule, helping us detangle Earth's history. The only way to see if the bombardment rate has changed is to have an age for every single crater, an extremely difficult task using traditional crater dating methods.

Pluto has always been the favourite of many who have cast their thoughts out to the stars and planets. More than that though, it has played a key role in our understanding of how our solar system is formed and it may be the key to further exploration of our neighbourhood of space. In this richly illustrated presentation we explore its history, our recent discoveries and how it may lead us to one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 21st century.

Are we standing on the brink of a new scientific revolution that will radically change our views on space, time, and gravity? In most circumstances, the theories of Einstein and Newton adequately describe gravity, but on cosmological scales, big questions arise, particularly surrounding the nature of dark matter and dark energy.