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Jon Culshaw stars in Oxford educational animation

Culshaw, star of the BBC’s Dead Ringers, features in ‘Rogue Planet’, an animation exploring the early history of the solar system. He voices ‘Sol i’, a hypothetical planet ejected 3.8 billion years ago.

Culshaw said in a statement, “At over five times the size of the Earth, Sol i is certainly the biggest character I’ve ever taken on. I liked the idea that the animation could turn an ancient world into a real character who could take us on a tour of our solar system’s past and the strange planets online volunteers are helping us to discover today.”

‘Rogue Planet’ is the fifth animation produced by Oxford Sparks, a web portal aimed at enabling public access and involvement with science at Oxford University.  Previous animations have covered topics such as the Large Hadron Collider and DNA.

Annabel Cook, Science Communications Officer at the University, told Cherwell, “The idea with all of the animations is that they focus on an area of science that’s very Oxford specific.”

She added, “As well as being generally appealing to the public and putting across quite simply an area of Oxford science, they can be used in schools as lesson starters.”

Oxford astrophysicist Dr Chris Lintott served as lead scientific advisor for ‘Rogue Planet’, stating, “I think the animation shows a possible past in a very accessible and amusing way, and we also hope it’ll inspire people to go to Planethunters.org and make more spectacular discoveries.”

Planet Hunters is a citizen science project supported by Oxford University, which encourages participants to help sort data from the NASA Kepler space mission.

A spokesperson for Oxford University said, “Oxford Sparks is one of many activities that the University undertakes to get the message out to everyone that science can be fun, and to tell them about some of the amazing research going on at Oxford. Other examples include the Pi Day Live interactive online event with Marcus du Sautoy on 14 March, the Oxford London Lecture, and the Oxford University Science Roadshow taking our scientists out to local schools for Science Week.

The spokesperson continued, “Science is vital to solving global problems, inventing new technologies, and helping our economy to grow, so encouraging tomorrow’s scientists should matter to everyone.”

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