Autumn Jeremiah Horrocks Lecture (1st Oct): How did the Universe come to look the way it does?

Tuesday 1st October, 6:30pm (refreshments from 6pm) 

Darwin Lecture Theatre, UCLAN, Preston Campus 

Prof. Arif Babul (University of Victoria, Canada)

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How did the Universe come to look the way it does? Human beings have been asking such questions since the dawn of civilisation. Today, by combining state-of-the-art physical models that leverage powerful supercomputers with exceptional data from cutting-edge telescopes like the Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescopes, cosmologists stand at the threshold of being able offer compelling, verifiable answers to such questions. And what we discovering is nothing less than astounding: We have learnt that everything we see has emerged from tiny ripple in the early Universe some 13 billion years ago; that galaxies – like our own Milky Way – are in fact dense collections of billions of stars held together by gravity; and they come in myriads of shapes and sizes. We now know that galaxies are not in fact isolated islands scattered across the vast cosmos as was once imagined. Instead, they are like sparkling dewdrops arranged along networks of filaments that look like a three-dimensional spider’s web. Galaxies breathe – in a sense – and in the process, exchangematter and energy with their environment. Consequently, their observed properties are products of ongoing competition between internal physics (nature) and environment (nurture). And the list continues. In this lecture, I will describe the major advances towards a comprehensive model of the Universe. I will highlight this model’s remarkable successes and describe the challenges, some of which we are still struggling to overcome. Finally, I will conclude by reflecting on what the path forward looks like. 

Speaker Biography

Prof. Arif Babul is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Victoria in Canada. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1989. He is a recipient of several prestigious awards for his significant contributions to the study of cosmic structure, including galaxy formation. Most notably, early in his career, he held a NATO Science Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and was elected U.S. National Academy of Science Kavli Fellow. He was recently elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, and he currently holds both the prestigious Infosys Visiting Chair Professorship at the Indian Institute for Science and a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at the University of Edinburgh. 

Photo caption: JHI Director Prof. Derek Ward-Thompson introducing the speaker at the lecture