Gazing at galaxies: what we know about the Universe

Galaxies are constantly changing and evolving, but as their lifetimes are billions of times longer than ours we cannot easily see these changes. I will demonstrate how we use the world's biggest telescopes to look back in time towards the edge of the Universe, to measure the sizes, shapes and chemistry of galaxies when the Universe was young. I will show why a huge variety of telescopes are needed to fully understand the evolving Universe and reveal it's secrets.

Please don’t twinkle, little star. All that jiggling blurs our view of the night sky. Astronomer Richard Massey felt twice aggrieved, when his toddler kept taunting him with that nursery rhyme. He describes the lengths Durham university took for a clearer view of the sky, by lifting a telescope above the Earth’s atmosphere. Space rockets were too expensive, so they got creative with party balloons and gaffer tape. The telescope found dark matter, but the balloons floated away. So it is part science, and part revenge on children’s third birthday parties everywhere.