11:30
Oxford University
November 5
Abstract:
The night sky is fascinating to humans, giving us a window on space beyond our home on Earth. By studying distant light coming from the earliest moments in time, I will talk about our quest to understand the history of the universe, and find out properties such as its ingredients and age. I’ll describe a conundrum facing astronomers today: our community’s two methods of measuring the rate that space is growing, and the age of the universe, don’t agree. Have we got something wrong in our understanding of the universe? I will describe our team's contribution to answering this question, using telescopes high in the Chilean desert tuned to measure millimetre-wavelength light. By surveying half the sky every couple of days, we also hope to see new types of astronomical events in distant parts of the universe.