The Royal Mail has released a set of 8 stamps to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Royal Astronomical Society. The stamps are designed to illustrate Britain’s contribution to the fields of spaceflight and astronomy, and each depicts a specific cosmic object, phenomenon or space mission.
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Named Visions of the Universe, the collection features the Cat’s Eye Nebula; geysers on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus; black holes; spinning neutron stars known as pulsars; Jupiter’s aurorae; the phenomenon known as gravitational lensing; Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was studied by the European Rosetta mission; and the Cygnus A Galaxy.
Each has been illustrated by artist Robert Ball in collaboration with the Royal Astronomical Society, which formed on 12 January 1820.
The stamps are available from 7,000 Post Office across the UK from 11 February 2020.
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Take a look at the new designs in our gallery below:
Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit jets of radiation. From Earth they are detected as a regular pulse, much like a ship at see observing a lighthouse on the coast. They were discovered in 1967 by astronomers Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish.
Like Earth, Jupiter has aurorae, produced when charged particles from the Sun interact with the atmosphere. Earth’s aurorae shine in red and green, but on Jupiter they shine in ultraviolet and X-ray. Jupiter’s aurorae are studied by astronomers at the University of Leicester.
Gravitational lensing was predicted by Einstein in his 1915 theory of relativity and confirmed in 1979 by astronomers including Dennis Walsh and Bob Carswell. It occurs when light from distant objects like galaxies and galaxy clusters is distorted by the mass of closer objects.
Geysers on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus were confirmed by the UK-built magnetometer on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Data collected by Cassini revealed a subsurface ocean below the moon’s ice crust, containing the molecular building blocks of life.
In the 1950s, astronomers at Jodrell Bank discovered radio emission was not coming from galaxy Cygnus A, but from a pair of radio lobes, one on either side of the galaxy. It’s thought energetic jets of particles are accelerated away from the centre by magnetic fields.
The Cat’s Eye Nebula was discovered by William Herschel – first RAS president – in 1786. The nebula provides a glimpse of what our own Sun may look like at the end of its life, as the outer layers of the Sun-like star at its centre drift off into space.
Black holes were first suggested as a phenomenon in 1783 by English natural philosopher John Michell, and their behaviour was mathematically described in 1916 by the German physicist Karl Schwarzschild.
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was the subject of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. The spacecraft and its Philae lander followed the comet on part of its journey around the Sun, observing changes on its surface and collecting data.
