Royal Astronomical Society’s NAM 2026: A Flipped Galaxy, a Sun That Switches Off, and a Battle for the Moon’s Far Side

For five days this week, the University of Birmingham has turned into the busiest crossroads in European astronomy. The Royal Astronomical Society’s 2026 National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2026) is being hosted by the University of Birmingham from Monday 20 July to Friday 24 July, gathering up to 1,000 delegates to present new findings, debate key questions and explore cutting-edge research.

NAM is not a conference in the ordinary sense. It is the annual heartbeat of an entire national research community. Sponsored and coordinated by the RAS, it functions as the primary annual meeting of the society and is one of the largest professional astronomy conferences in Europe. Its origins go back to the RAS’s decision to take its scientific meetings outside London — the «out of town» meetings, the first of which was held in 1948. This year’s edition covers the full range of UK astronomy research, including the instrumentation and astro-particle communities, and incorporates the UK Solar Physics (UKSP) and the Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial (MIST) communities, running in a hybrid format designed to let as many people as possible take part.

A Sun that switches off before it sleeps

The heliophysics results have been among the most striking. Sandra Chapman, of the University of Warwick, presented a method that predicts the strength of the Sun’s next activity cycle up to seven years before it peaks, using the sunspot number at a newly identified «switch-off» point where the most extreme space weather ends abruptly. Her early forecast points to a moderate Cycle 26 with a sunspot number near 100–120, comparable to or weaker than the current Cycle 25.

The physics behind it is elegant. The switch-off coincides with active regions migrating below roughly 15 degrees of solar latitude, where differential rotation weakens; Chapman argues that the CMEs driving the most extreme space weather are powered by that differential rotation twisting the emerging magnetic field. For those of us who work on Solar Cycle 25, this is a precursor with real predictive teeth — and one that will be testable with observations alone in about two years.

Space weather also dominated the instrumentation track, where Imperial College’s MAGIC magnetometer — bound for deep space aboard the HENON mission — was presented as a route to warnings received hours before Earth is hit, rather than minutes.

A galaxy that flipped

From Durham came one of the boldest results of the week. Using supercomputer simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies, a team found that galaxies with slowly rotating stellar haloes are more likely to have undergone a major «disc flip», reorienting by more than 90 degrees. The work analysed 25 Milky Way analogues from the Auriga suite of cosmological simulations, and lead researcher Kirill Batrakov ties it directly to our own history: the Milky Way’s head-on collision with Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus, absorbed some 10 to 11 billion years ago. The mystery it solves is a stubborn one — disc stars orbit the galactic centre at around 220 km/s, while halo stars crawl along at roughly 25 km/s.

Bullets from the galaxy’s rarest explosion

Warwick’s John Mills reported that the dust shrouding V445 Puppis has finally thinned, confirming that the Milky Way’s only known helium nova is a white dwarf accreting from an extremely rare helium star. Embedded in the outflow are high-speed «bullets» of possibly oxygen-rich gas moving at up to 20 million miles per hour — objects with no counterpart in any other known nova. The stakes go well beyond a single system: repeated helium-rich eruptions may be one pathway to Type Ia supernovae, the standard candles used to measure cosmic distances.

Who owns the far side of the Moon?

NAM has never been only about data. On Tuesday evening, a panel debated whether the lunar far side should be reserved for science. Joe Silk and Jonathan McDowell defended preservation, noting that the permanently radio-quiet far side is the only nearby site where radio telescopes could observe the cosmic «dark ages» without human-made interference. Against the motion, Nikita Chiu argued that commercial and scientific activity can coexist under appropriate governance. The audience shifted: support for the motion rose from 68 per cent before the debate to 76 per cent afterwards.

The wider stakes

All of this unfolds against a tense funding backdrop. The RAS has cautiously welcomed a decision that largely protects UK astronomy from previously proposed cuts, after fears of a reduction of up to 30 per cent caused profound concern across the community.

That is precisely why NAM matters. A national meeting is where a scientific community demonstrates, in public and in one room, that it is worth funding. Birmingham 2026 has made that case with unusual clarity — from the interior of the Sun to the far side of the Moon.

© 2026 Homer Dávila Gutiérrez, FRAS — SKYCR.ORG. All rights reserved.