Island Universes: Discovering Galaxies Beyond the Milky Way

The discovery that we live in an ordinary galaxy, one of several hundred billion in the observable Universe, instigated a profound change in thinking about our place in the Universe. This first lecture covered the Great Debate of the early twentieth century as new telescopes and new ways of observing the cosmos put our Milky Way in its place; and looked at how subsequent observations helped us understand how galaxies like our own formed and evolved.

Part of:

Discovering the Universe

This event was on Wed, 13 Sep 2023

Astronomy

Physics

Science

Professor Chris Lintott

Professor Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, and a Research Fellow at New College.

Having been educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and University College London, his research now ranges from understanding how galaxies form and evolve, to using machine learning to find the most unusual things in the Universe, to predicting the properties of visiting interstellar asteroids. He is Principal Investigator of the Zooniverse citizen science platform, which provides opportunities for more than two million online volunteers to contribute to scientific research, and which was the topic of his first book, ‘The Crowd and the Cosmos’.

Professor Lintott is best known as presenter of the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night program, and as an accomplished lecturer. Away from work, he cooks, suffers through being a fan of Torquay United and Somerset cricket, and spends time with a rescued lurcher, Mr Max, with whom he presents the Dog Stars podcast.