Seeing In The Dark

Our eyes provide our most direct way of observing the world around us, including the night sky above our heads. With telescopes and cameras we can study stars, nebulae and galaxies galore. However, visible light is only a sliver of the light emitted by those objects. In this talk we take a look at how extraterrestrial radio waves were discovered and how it spurred a new branch of astronomy that we call "radio astronomy" that ended up providing valuable insight in our understanding of galaxies and black holes.

I will show some of the recent breakthrough results on observing black holes - the amazing direct image of the shadow of the event horizon in our Galaxy, as well as gravitational waves. And then I will explore some of the fun ideas in science fiction where black holes are used as devices for travel through time and space, and see which of these might actually be possible!

Similar to the light we see in our day-to-day lives, radio waves are electromagnetic waves, but with a much longer wavelength. Radio telescopes are sensitive to this "colour" of light, allowing us to see the Universe in a completely different way. In this wavelength, we see black holes, interstellar gas and dust in distant galaxies, the formation of new stars, and many more exotic objects. In this talk, I will show you what the Universe looks like through a modern radio telescope and what we are trying to learn from such observations.