To Infinity and Beyond

Professor Omar Almaini will tell the story of a 10-year international project to map the distant Universe. The unique images from the Ultra-Deep Survey (led by the University of Nottingham) are the deepest ever obtained over such a large area of sky. Over 300,000 galaxies have been detected over an area roughly 3 times the size of the full moon. The data are being used to study the formation and evolution of galaxies over the last 13 billion years of cosmic history, revealing a story of dramatic change and transformation.

The most startling thing we have learnt about the Universe in the last decade is that the speed with which galaxies are moving away from one another is now beginning to accelerate. Nothing in the physics that we understand can explain this observation. There must be a new, mysterious substance in the Universe which behaves unlike anything we know. We call this substance dark energy. I will describe what we currently know about dark energy, and explain how table top experiments in the laboratory are helping us to understand what is happening on the largest scales in the universe.

Ever since telescopes were first turned on galaxies, astronomers have been struck by their appearance, and have tried to understand how they evolved to their current beautiful structures. For centuries, the only clues we had came from their two-dimensional visual appearance, but now we have many new avenues to pursue that open up whole extra dimensions of information. In this talk, Professor Merrifield will describe how this wealth of data has revolutionised our understanding of galaxies and will look to the coming decade to see what else we can hope to learn.